The hackathon is coming

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The Geophysics Hackathon is one month away! Signing up is not mandatory — you can show up on the day if you like — but it does help with the planning. It's 100% free, and I guarantee you'll enjoy yourself. You'll also learn tons about geophysics and about building software. Deets: Thrive, Denver, 8 am, 25–26 October. Bring a laptop.

Need more? Here's all the info you could ask for. Even more? Ask by email or in the comments. 

Send your project ideas

The theme this year is RESOLUTION. Participants are encouraged to post projects to hackathon.io ahead of time — especially if you want to recruit others to help. And even if you're not coming to the event, we'd love to hear your project ideas. Here are some of the proto-ideas we have so far: 

  • Compute likely spatial and temporal resolution from some basic acquisition info: source, design, etc.
  • Do the same but from information from the stack: trace spacing, apparent bandwidth, etc.
  • Find and connect literature about seismic and log resolution using online bibliographic data.
  • What does the seismic spectrum look like, given STFT limitations, or Gabor uncertainty?

If you have a bright idea, get in touch by email or in the comments. We'd love to hear from you.

Thank you to our sponsors

Three forward-thinking companies have joined us in making the hackathon as much a geophysics party as well as a scientific workshop (a real workshop). I think this industry may have trained us to take event sponsorship for granted, but it's easy to throw $5000 at the Marriott for Yet Another Coffee Break. Handing over money to a random little company in Nova Scotia to buy coffee, tacos, and cool swag for hungry geophysicists and programmers takes real guts! 

Please take a minute to check out our sponsors and reward them for supporting innovation in our community. 

dGB GeoTeric OGS

Students: we are offering $250 bursaries to anyone looking for help with travel or accommodation. Just drop me a line with a project idea. If you know a student that might enjoy the event, please forwadrd this to them.

The hack is back: An invitation to get creative

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We're organizing another hackathon! It's free, and it's for everyone — not just programmers. So mark your calendar for the weekend of 25 and 26 October, sign up with a friend, and come to Denver for the most creative 48 hours you'll spend this year. Then stay for the annual geophysics fest that is the SEG Annual Meeting!

First things first: what is a hackathon? Don't worry, it's not illegal, and it has nothing to do with security. It has to do with ideas and collaborative tool creation. Here's a definition from Wikipedia:

A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, or codefest) is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.

I would add that we just need a lot of scientists — you can bring your knowledge of workflows, attributes, wave theory, or rock physics. We need all of that.

Creativity in geophysics

The best thing we can do with our skills — and to acquire new ones — is create things. And if we create things with and alongside others, we learn from them and they learn from us, and we make lasting connections with people. We saw all this last year, when we built several new geophysics apps:

hackathon_2014_calendar.png

The event is at the THRIVE coworking space in downtown Denver, less than 20 minutes' walk from the convention centre — a Manhattan distance of under 1 mile. They are opening up especially for us — so we'll have the place to ourselves. Just us, our laptops, high-speed WiFi, and lots of tacos. 

Sign up here.It's going to be awesome.

The best in the biz

GeoTeric_logo.jpg

This business is blessed with some forward-looking companies that know all about innovation in subsurface geoscience. We're thrilled to have some of them as sponsors of our event, and I hope they will also be providing coders and judges for the event itself. So far we have generous support from dGB — creators of the OpendTect seismic interpretation platform — and ffA — creators the GeoTeric seismic attribute analysis toolbox. A massive Thank You to them both.

If you think your organization might be up for supporting the event, please get in touch! And remember, a fantastic way to support the event — for free! — is just to come along and take part. Sign your team up here!

Student grants

We know there's a lot going on at SEG on this same weekend, and we know it's easier to get money for traditional things like courses. So... We promise that this hackathon will bring you at least as much lasting joy, insight, and skill development as any course. And, if you'll write and tell us what you'd build, we'll consider you for one of four special grants of $250 to help cover your extra costs. No strings. Send your ideas to matt@agilegeoscience.com.

Update

on 2014-09-07 12:17 by Matt Hall

OpenGeoSolutions, the Calgary-based tech company that's carrying the FreeUSP torch and exporing the frequency domain so thoroughly, has sponsred the hackathon again this year. Thank you to Jamie and Chris and everyone else at OGS!

At home with Leonardo

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Well, OK, Leonardo da Vinci wasn't actually there, having been dead 495 years, but on Tuesday morning I visited the house at which he spent the last three years of his life. I say house, it's more of a mansion — the Château du Clos Lucé is a large 15th century manoir near the centre of the small market town of Amboise in the Loire valley of northern France. The town was once the royal seat of France, and the medieval grandeur still shows. 

Leonardo was invited to France by King Francis I in 1516. Da Vinci had already served the French governor of Milan, and was feeling squeezed from Rome by upstarts Rafael and Michelangelo. It's nice to imagine that Frank appreciated Leo's intellect and creativity — he sort of collected artists and writers — but let's face it, it was probably the Italian's remarkable capacity for dreaming up war machines, a skill he had honed in the service of mercenary and cardinal Cesare Borgia. Leonardo especially seemed to like guns; here are models of a machine gun and a tank, alongside more peaceful concoctions:

Inspired by José Carcione's assertion that Leonardo was a geophysicst, and plenty of references to fossils (even Palaeodictyon) in his notebooks, I scoured the place for signs of Leonardo dablling in geology or geophysics, but to no avail. The partly-restored Renaissance floor tiles did have some inspiring textures and lots of crinoid fossils... I wonder if he noticed them as he shuffled around?

If you are ever in the area, I strongly recommend a visit. Even my kids (10, 6, and 4) enjoyed it, and it's close to some other worthy spots., specifically Chenonceau (for anyone) and Cheverny (for Tintin fans like me). The house, the numerous models, and the garden (below — complete with tasteful reproductions from Leonardo's works) were all terrific.

Check out José Carcione's two chapters about Leonardo and
his work in 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics.
Download the chapter for free! [PDF, 3.8MB]

Atlantic geology hits Wikipedia

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WikiProject Geology is one of the gathering places for geoscientists in Wikipedia.Regular readers of this blog know that we're committed to open scientific communication, and that we're champions of wikis as one of the venues for that communication, and that we want to see more funky stuff happen at conferences. In this spirit, we hosted a Wikipedia editing session at the Atlantic Geoscience Society Colloquium in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, this past weekend. 

As typically happens with these funky sessions, it wasn't bursting at the seams: The Island of Misfit Toys is not overcrowded. There were only 7 of us: three Agilistas, another consultant, a professor, a government geologist, and a student. But it's not the numbers that matter (I hope), it's the spirit of the thing. We were a keen bunch and we got quite a bit done. Here are the articles we started or built upon:

The birth of the Atlantic Geoscience Society page gave the group an interesting insight into Wikipedia's quality control machine. Within 10 minutes of publishing it, the article was tagged for speedy deletion by an administrator. This sort of thing is always a bit off-putting to noobs, because Wikipedia editors can be a bit, er, brash, or at least impersonal. This is not that surprising when you consider that new pages are created at a rate of about one a minute some days. Just now I resurrected a stripped-down version of the article, and it has already been reviewed. Moral: don't let anyone tell you that Wikipedia is a free-for-all.

All of these pages are still (and always will be) works in progress. But we added 5 new pages and a substantial amount of material with our 28 or so hours of labour. Considering most of those who came had never edited a wiki before, I'm happy to call this a resounding success. 

Much of my notes from the event could be adapted to any geoscience wiki editing session — use them as a springboard to get some champions of open-access science together at your next gathering. If you'd like our help, get in touch.

2013 retrospective

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It's almost the end of the year, so we ask for your indulgence as we take our traditional look back at some of the better bits of the blog from 2013. If you have favourite subjects, we always like feedback!

Most visits

Amazingly, nothing we can write seems to be able to topple Shale vs tight, which is one of the firsts posts I wrote on this blog. Most of that traffic is coming from Google search, of course. I'd like to tell you how many visits the posts get, but web stats are fairly random — this year we'll have had either 60,000 or 245,000 visits, depending on who you believe — very precise data! Anyway, here are the rest...

Most comments

We got our 1000th blog comment at the end of September (thanks Matteo!). Admittedly some of them were us, but hey, we like arbitrary milestones as much as the next person. Here are the most commented-on posts of the year:

Hackathon skull

Hackathon skull

Proud moments

Some posts don't necessarily win a lot of readers or get many comments, but they mark events that were important to us. A sort of public record. Our big events in 2013 were...

Our favourites

Of course we have our personal favourite posts too — pieces that were especially fun to put together, or that took an unusual amount of craft and perspiration to finish (or more likely a sound beating with a blunt instrument).

Evan

Matt

I won't go into reader demographics as they've not changed much since last year. One thing is interesting, though not very surprising — about 15% of visitors are now reading on mobile devices, compared to 10% in 2012 and 7% in 2011. The technology shift is amazing: in 2011 we had exactly 94 visits from readers on tablets — now we get about 20 tablet visits every day, mostly from iPads.

It only remains for me to say Thank You to our wonderful community of readers. We appreciate every one of you, and love getting email and comments more than is probably healthy. The last 3 years have been huge fun, and we can't wait for 2014. If you celebrate Christmas may it be merry — and we wish you all the best for the new year.

Plant a seed for science and tech

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Cruising around the web last weekend looking for geosciencey Christmas presents, coupled with having 3 kids (aged 9, 5, and 3) to entertain and educate, I just realized I have a long list of awesome toys to share. Well, I say toys, but these amazing things are almost in a class of their own...

Bigshot camera

A full kit for a child to build his or her own camera, and it's only $89. Probably best suited to those aged 7 up to about 12. Features:

  • comes with everything you need, including a screwdriver,
  • a crank instead of a battery,
  • multiple lenses including anaglyphic 3D,
  • a set of online tutorials about the components and how they work — enlightening!

LittleBits

Epic. For kids (and others) that aren't quite ready for a soldering iron, these magentic blocks just work. There are blocks for power, for input (like this pressure sensor), and for output. They can, and should, be combined with each other and anything else (Lego, Meccano, straws, dinosaurs) for maximum effect. Wonderful.

Anything at all from SparkFun

... and there's Adafruit too. I know we had Tandy or RadioShack or whatever in the early 1980s, but we didn't have the Internet. So life was, you know, hard. No longer. Everything at SparkFun is affordable, well-designed, well-documented, and—well—fun. I mean, who wouldn't want to build their own Simon Says? 

And this is just a fraction of what's out there... Lego MINDSTORMS for the bigger kids, GoldieBlox for smaller kids, Raspberry Pi for the teens. I get very excited when I think about what this means for the future of invention, creativity, and applied science. 

Even more exciting, it's us grown-ups that get to help them explore all this fun. Where will you start?

All you want for Christmas

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It's that time again! If you're tired of giving the same old rocks to the same old geologists, I've got some fresh ideas for you.

Stuff

  • My wife came back from town recently with this spectacular soap, from Soap Rocks. I mean, just look at it. It's even better in real life.
  • You just can't go wrong with a beautiful hammer, like this limited edition Estwing. Don't forget safety glasses!
  • Or go miniature, with these tiny (Canadian!) hammers in gold ($859) or silver ($249). Steepish prices, but these aren't exactly mainstream.
  • More jewellery: geode earrings. Hopefully not too massive.

Tees

It's the obligatory t-shirt collection! Here are some that jumped out at me — and one of them is even a bit geophysical. Available from (left to right) Threadless (here's another fun one), Etsy, and Metropark.

Books... and non-books

  • There are loads of books in our reading list — some of them are essential, and some are totally workable as gifts.
  • It would be remiss of me not to mention our own new book, 52 Things You Should Know About Geology — perfect (I think, but I would say that) for students and professionals alike, especially those in applied/industrial geoscience.
  • I'm a big fan of Edward Tufte's beautiful books about data visualization, and they are now available in paperback. All four books for $100 is truly a bargain.
  • It's not a book exactly, but I do like this minerals poster. Although less useful, this arty version is even prettier... and this cushion is verging on spectacular. 

Goggle box

Tired of reading about geology after cranking through papers or dissertations all day? TV has rocks too! There's Iain Stewart's various series (right — Earth, 2009, and How To Grow A Planet, 2011) for some quality BBC programming. If you're in Canada, you might prefer CBC's Geologic Journey, 2011 — inexplicably hosted by a non-geologist. The Discovery Channel made Inside Planet Earth, 2009 but I've never liked their stuff. some of this stuff might even be on Netflix... 

Kids' stuff

Kids like geology too. A Rock Is Lively manages to be beautiful and informative, Rocks: Hard, Soft, Smooth, and Rough focuses on the science, and If Rocks Could Sing is just cute. If it's toys you're after, you can start them young with this wooden stacking volcano, or you could go for this epic Lego globe... (not for the half-hearted: it will require you to load the Digital Designer file and order a large number of bricks).

Still stuck? Try my Christmas post from last year, or the year before, or the year before that. I highly recommend Evelyn Mervine's posts too — loads more ideas there.

The T-shirt and book cover images are copyright of their respective owners and assumed to be fair use. The soap picture is licensed CC-BY.

What we built at the weekend

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10 days ago we wrapped up the Geophysics Hackathon in Houston. I wrote a bit about it right after the event, but now I've gathered the evidence and can share more of the awesome. First of all — what did everyone build in the 2 days? 

Team 1: Velocity modelling in iOS

Essau Worthy-Blackwell (Southwestern Energy), Jacob Foshee (independent iOS dev), Evan Bianco (Agile), and Ben Bougher (independent, mostly helping Agile) built 2 tools exploring velocity modelling and depth conversion. One was a desktop tool (in Python), the other was an iOS app — watch this.

Team 2: LAS soup demux

Joe Jennings (Colorado School of Mines), Mike Stone (Lukoil), and Karl Schleicher (University of Texas at Austin) built a tool in Python for coping with messy data. Karl is a champion of open data, and needs a tool for quickly exploring large repositories. You can see their progress in the code in GitHub — feel free to help them out!

Team 3: A 1D forward model

Duncan Child (Spectraseis) joined Chris Chalcraft, Paul Garossino, and James Alison from OpenGeoSolutions to help out with his pumped up Java and JSON wrangling skills. Greg Partyka even popped in to help. Here is Blockfilter in GitHub.

Everyone's a winner

As well as being a fun way to get to know people, and create something new together, the event was a (very low key) contest. We had some experienced and perceptive judges to pick some winners and decide how the exactly 3 prizes would be distributed among the exactly 3 teams:

  • Team 3 were awarded with some Raspberry Pi starter kits, to recognize their solid idea, well-constructed code, and respect for work-life balance (hey, it was the weekend!). It was fun peeking over their shoulders occasionally.

  • Team 2 had the most commercially viable product, and as such went away with 2 books: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder. Thanks to sponsor SURGE Accelerator, the team also won the chance to talk to a business mentor about their ideas.

  • Team 1 delivered the shiniest product at the end of the weekend, with the iOS app and a desktop clone. They each won one of Google's latest Nexus 7 tablets, to continue with their app-building skills.

What will you build?

Thanks again to the daredevils who showed up, the judges — especially Maitri Erwin, who helped out in lots of ways all weekend — and of course the sponsors: OpenGeoSolutions, Enthought, and dGB Earth Sciences. If you missed the event, dear reader, I hope you'll come along next time to share ideas, test workflows, and build new things.

Places for ideas in Houston

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Evan has told before of how productive he is at the HUB Halifax. And ever since I've been involved in The HUB South Shore, a co-working space in my small town, I've been keenly interested in communal and collaborative workspaces. I think they're a powerful model for independent scientists and entrepreneurs, perhaps even inside large companies too. 

Because of this, and because most hotels are such boring venues (there are always exceptions), we decided to host the hackathon this weekend at a co-working space, START Houston (right). A converted urban loft residence (well, a loft on the ground floor), it's got downtown character with an artistic edge. Evan and I gatecrashed a startup pitch coaching session while we were there — we heard 3-minute pitches from 4 Houston startups, including eOilBoom, an interesting crowdfunding platform for oil and gas concerns, and Philantro, a curated social layer for non-profits and philanthropists.

We need this level of ideation, business-model testing, and experimental entrepreneurship in subsurface science. How do we make this happen?

Co-working? Co-reseach!

Two weeks ago, I tweeted something about the hackathon, and Jacob at Brightwork Co-Research tweeted back at me:

Just another one of the wonderful serendipities of social media. That one connection is worth a lot to me, and is characteristic of the generous community of scientists on Twitter.

While in town, we thought we'd drop in and see what Brightwork is about... and I've rarely been more excited. Jacob Shiach (left) showed us the embryonic space neighbouring Rice University, complete with a rapid prototyping space (think of hardware hacking soldering, 3D printers, and so on), and a wet lab for full-on biotechnical research. In under a year, Jacob plans to fill the space with researchers in bio, physics, math, technology, and any other scientific discipline that needs a lab outside of academia or industry. What can independent researchers do when they have all the tools of big research? What would you do with your own lab?

These places exist

To complete our tour, we headed over to Platform — a more conventional co-working space around the corner from Brightwork. The familiar buzz and productive vibe of co-working hits you immediately: here a livestream of TEDxHouston City2.0, there a new startup hashing out customer segments for their product. Imagine an office full of smart, energetic, friendly people who don't actually have to work together, no meetings, and no sign above the sink saying "Your mother doesn't work here!". Yeah, those places exist.

Ten ways to make a difference

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SEG WikiAfter reading my remarks yesterday about geoscience wikis, perhaps you're itching to share some of what you know. Below are ten quick ways to get started. And if you're going to SEG next week, you're in luck: you'll find a quick way to get started. 

Ten things you can do

First, if you really just want to dive in, here are ten easy things you can do in almost any wiki. Let's use SEG Wiki as an example — but this applies equally well to SubSurfWiki, PetroWiki, or Wikipedia.

  1. Read it — find a page or category that interests you, and start exploring the content
  2. Edit it — nothing tricky, but if you find a typo or other small error, hit Edit and fix it (you can do this without logging in on Wikipedia, but most other wikis require you to make an account first. This isn't usually a deliberate effort to put you off — allowing anonymous editing results in an amazing amount robot spam. Yes, robot spam.)
  3. Share it — like most of the web, wikis need to be shared to survive. When you find something useful, share it.
  4. Add a profile — if you're an SEG member, you already have an account on SEG Wiki. Why not add some info about yourself? Go log in to SEG.org then click this link. Here's mine. 
  5. Add a sandbox — Edit your user page, add this: [[/Sandbox/]], then save your page. You'll see a red link. Click on it. Try some editing — you can do anything you like here. Again, here's mine — click Edit and copy my code. 
  6. Fix equations — most of the equations in the SEG Encyclopedic Dictionary are poorly formatted. If you know LaTeX, you can help fix them. Here's one that's been fixed. Here's a bad one (if it looks OK, someone beat you to it :)
  7. Add references — Just like technical papers, wikis need citations and references if they are to be useful and trusted. Most articles in SEG Wiki have citations, but the references are on another page. Here's one I've fixed. 
  8. Add a figure — Again, the figures are mostly divorced from their articles. The Q article shows one way to integrate them. Some articles have lots of figures. 
  9. Improve a definition — Many of the Dictionary definitions are out of date or unhelpfully terse. Long articles probably belong in the 'main' namespace (that is, not the Dictionary part) — so for example I split Spectral decomposition into a main article, apart from the short dictionary definition.
  10. Add an article — This may seem like a big step, but don't be shy. Be bold! We can worry later if the new article needs to be split or combined or renamed or reformatted. The point is to start.

Wiki markup takes a little getting used to, but you can get a very long way with a little know-how. This wiki markup cheatsheet will give you a head start.

One place you can start

SEG Annual MeetingAt the SEG Annual Meeting next week, I'll be hanging about the Press Room from 11 am till 1 pm every day, with John Stockwell, Karl Schleicher and some other wiki enthusiasts. We'd be happy to answer any questions or help you get started.

Bring your laptop! Spread the word! Bring a friend! See you there!