May linkfest

The monthly News post wasn't one of our most popular features, so it's on the shelf. Instead, I thought I'd share all the most interesting, quirky, mind-blowing, or just plain cool things I've spotted on the web over the last month.

– Do not miss this. One of them stands out above all the others. If you like modern analogs and satellite imagery, you're going to love Google Earth Engine. I've started a list of geologically interesting places to visit — please add to it!

– More amazing images. I'll never get bored of looking at gigapans, and Callan Bentley's are among the best geological ones. I especially like his annotated ones.

– Classic blog. Greg Gbur writes one of the best physics blogs, and his focus is on optics, so there's often good stuff there for geophysicists. This post on Chladni patterns is pure acoustic goodness and well worth a slow read. 

– New geoscience blog. Darren Wilkinson is a young geoscientist in the UK, and writes a nice geeky blog about his research. 

– Brilliant and simple. Rowan Cockett is a student at UBC, but builds brilliant geological web apps on the side. He has a knack for simplicity and his latest creation makes stereonets seem, well, simple. Impressive. 

– New magazine. Kind of. There's not enough satire or ragging in the petroleum press, so it's refreshing to hear of Proved Plus Probable, a fairly wacky weekly online rag emanating from Calgary [thanks to Dan for the tip!]. Top headline: Legendary geologist invents new crayons. 

– Counter-factual geology. I love these pictures of an imagined ring around earth.

– Never buy graph paper again. Make some just how you like it!

– Bacon. It was a revelation to find that some rocks look just like bacon.

That's it! I share most of this sort of thing on Twitter. Really useful stuff I tend to stick on my pinboard — you're welcome to browse. If you have a geological or geeky bookmark collection, feel free to share it in the comments!

Submitting assumptions for meaningful answers

The best talk of the conference was Ran Bachrach's on seismics for unconventionals. He enthusiastically described the physics to his spectators with conviction and duty, and explained why they should care. Isotropic, VTI, and orthorhombic media anisotropy models are used not because they are right, but because they are simple. If the assumptions you bring to the problem are reasonable, the answers can be considered meaningful. If you haven't considered and tested your assumptions, you haven't subscribed to reason. In a sense, you haven't held up your end of the bargain, and there will never be agreement. This talk should be mandatory viewing for anyone working seismic for unconventionals. Advocacy for reason. Too bad it wasn't recorded.

I am both privileged and obliged to celebrate such nuggets of awesomeness. That's a big reason why I blog. And on the contrary, we should call out crappy talks when we see them to raise the bar. Indeed, to quote Zen Faulkes, "...we should start creating more of an expectation that scientific talks will be reviewed and critiqued. And names will be named."

The talk from HEF Petrophysical entitled, Towards modelling three-dimensional oil sands permeability distribution using borehole image logs, drew me in. I was curious enough to show up. But as the talk unfolded, my curiosity was left unsatisfied. A potentially interesting workflow of transforming high-resolution resistivity measurements into flow permeability was obfuscated with a pointless upscaling step. The meat of anything like this is in the transform itself, but it was missing. It's also the most trivial bit; just cross-plot one property with another and show people. So I am guessing they didn't have any permeability data. If that was the case, how can you stand up and talk about permeability? It was a sandwich without the filling. The essential thing that defines a piece of work is the creativity. The thing you add that wasn't there before. I was disappointed. Disappointed that it was accepted, and that no one else piped up. 

I will paraphrase a conversation I had with Ran at the coffee break: Some are not aware, some choose to ignore, and some forget that works of geoscience are problems of extreme complexity. In fact, the only way we can cope with complexity is to make certain assumptions that make our problem solvable. If all you do is say "here is my solution", you suck. But if instead you ask, "Have I convinced you that my assumptions are reasonable?", it entirely changes the conversation. It entirely changes the specialist's role. Only when you understand your assumptions can we talk about whether the results are reasonable. 

Have you ever felt conflicted on whether or not you should say something?

Here comes GeoConvention 2013

Next week Matt and I are heading to the petroleum capital of Canada for the 2013 GeoConvention. There will be 308 talks, 125 posters, over 4000 attendees, 100 exhibiting companies, and at least 2 guys blogging their highlights off.

My picks for Monday

Studying the technical abstracts ahead of time is the only way to make the most of your schedule. There are 9 sessions going on at any given time, a deep sense of FOMO has already set in. These are the talks I have decided on for Monday: 

Seismics for unconventionals

I watched Carl Reine from Nexen give a talk two years ago where he deduced a power-law relationship characterizing natural fracture networks in the Horn River shale. He will show how integrating such fracture intensity patterns with inversion models yields a powerful predictor of frackability, and uses microseismic to confirm it.

On a related note, and also from the Horn River Basin, Andreas Wuestefeld will show how microseismic can be used to identify fluid drainage patterns from microseismic data. Production simulation from an actual microseismic experiment. Numerical modeling, and physical experiment inextricably linked. I already love it.

Forward models and experimental tests

One is a design case study for optimizing interpolation, the other is a 3D seismic geometry experiment, the third is a benchtop physical fracture model made out of Plexiglass and resin.

Broadband seismic

Gets to the point of what hinders seismic resolution, and it does something about it through thoughtful design. This is just really nice looking data, two talks, same author: a step change, and impact of broadband. 

Best title award 

Goes to Forensic chemostratigraphy. Gimmicky name or revolutionary concept? You can't always judge a talk by the title, or the quality of the abstract. But it's hard not to. What talks are on your must-see list this year?

A really good conversation

Matt and I are hosting an unsession on the morning of Tuesday 7 May. It will be structured, interactive, and personal. The result: a ranked list of the most pressing problems facing the upstream geoscientists, especially in those hard to reach places between the disciplines. This is not a session where you sit and listen. Everyone will participate. We will explore questions that matter, connect diverse perspectives, and, above all, capture our collective knowledge. It might be scary, it might be uncomfortable, it might not be for you. But if you think it is, bring your experience and individuality, and we will do that thing called integration. We can only host 60 people, so if you don't want to be turned away, arrive early to claim a spot. We start at 8 a.m. in Telus 101/102 on the main floor of the north building.

News headlines

Our old friend the News post... We fell off the wagon there for a bit. From now on we'll just post news when we collect a few stories, or as it happens. If you miss the old last-Friday-of-the-month missive, we are open to being convinced!

First release of Canopy

Back in November we mentioned Canopy, Austin-based Enthought's new Python programming environment, especially aimed at scientists. Think of it as Python (an easy-to-use language) in MATLAB form (with file management, plotting, etc.). Soon, Enthought plan to add a geophysical toolbox — SEGY read/write, trace display, and so on. We're very, very excited for the future of rapid geophysical problem-solving! More on the Enthought blog.

The $99 supercomputer

I recently got a Raspberry Pi — a $35 Linux machine a shade larger than a credit card. We're planning to use it at The HUB South Shore to help kids learn to code. These little machines are part of what we think could be an R&D revolution, as it gets cheaper and cheaper to experiment. Check out the University of Southampton's Raspberry Pi cluster!

If that's not awesome enough for you, how about Parallella, which ships this summer and packs 64 cores for under $100! If you're a software developer, you need to think about whether your tools are ready for parallel processing — not just on the desktop, but everywhere. What becomes possible?

Geophysics + 3D printing = awesome

Unless you have been living on a seismic boat for the last 3 years, you can't have failed to notice 3D printing. I get very excited when I think about the possibilities — making real 3D geomodels, printing replacement parts in the field, manifesting wavefields, geobodies, and so on. The best actual application we've heard of so far — these awesome little physical models in the Allied Geophysical Laboratories at the University of Houston (scroll down a bit).

Sugru

Nothing to do with geophysics, but continuing the hacker tech and maker theme... check out sugru.com — amazing stuff. Simple, cheap, practical. I am envisaging a maker lab for geophysics — who wants in?

Is Oasis the new Ocean?

Advanced Seismic is a Houston-based geophysical software startup that graduated from the Surge incubator in 2012. So far, they have attracted a large amount of venture capital, and I understand they're after tens of millions more. They make exciting noises about Oasis, a new class of web-aware, social-savvy software with freemium pricing. But so far there's not a lot to see — almost everything on their site says 'coming soon' and Evan and I have had no luck running the (Windows-only) demo tool. Watch this space.

Slow pitch

The world's longest-running lab experiment is a dripping flask of pitch, originally set up in 1927. The hydrocarbon has a viscosity of about 8 billion centipoise, which is 1000 times more viscous than Alberta bitumen. So far 8 drops have fallen, the last on 28 November 2000. The next? Looks like any day now! Or next year. 

Image: University of Queensland, licensed CC-BY-SA. 

The HUB on the South Shore

One of the things we dream about is a vibrant start-up community in the energy sector. A sort of Silicon Valley, but in the Bow Valley, or the Woodlands, or wherever. And focused on the hard, important problems in our field. More young people bringing their ideas, energy and talent — and more experienced people taking a chance, investing, and mentoring. Wresting more of the innovation opportunity back from big E&P and service companies, and freeing the professionals trapped in them.

We also want to see some of this in Nova Scotia. Indeed, the future of the Nova Scotian economy depends on it. So Agile has invested in a new community catalyst on the South Shore, the region where I live. Along with two others, I have renovated an old school room (left) and started The HUB South Shore — a place where freelancers, entrepreneurs, and professionals can come to work, network, not work, and learn. Affiliated with the HUB Halifax that Evan frequents, it's part of a global coworking movement, and a far-reaching network of HUBs.

Most importantly, it's a place to be around other highly productive, creative individuals — all of whom have made bold choices in their careers. Their proximity gives us all greater courage.  

There are similar spaces in Calgary, Houston, Aberdeen, and Perth. They completely transform the experience of working alone, or in small groups like Agile. Instead of isolation, you gain instant access to other self-starters, potential colleagues, and new friends. Many of these spaces are de facto incubators, with ready access to tools, people, and even financial backing. They are places where things happen — without IT, HR, or Legal. Imagine!

If you're thinking about starting out on your own, or with a friend or three, look around for a co-working space. It might make the transition from employee to freelancer (or even employer) a little less daunting. 

And if you find yourself on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, come to the HUB and say hello!

News of the month

The last news of the year. Here's what caught our eye in December.

Online learning, at a price

There was an online university revolution in 2012 — look for Udacity (our favourite), Coursera, edX, and others. Paradigm, often early to market with good new ideas, launched the Paradigm Online University this month. It's a great idea — but the access arrangement is the usual boring oil-patch story: only customers have access, and they must pay $150/hour — more than most classroom- and field-based courses! Imagine the value-add if it was open to all, or free to customers.

Android apps on your PC

BlueStacks is a remarkable new app for Windows and Mac that allows you to run Google's Android operating system on the desktop. This is potentially awesome news — there are over 500,000 apps on this platform. But it's only potentially awesome because it's still a bit... quirky. I tried running our Volume* and AVO* apps on my Mac and they do work, but they look rubbish. Doubtless the technology will evolve rapidly — watch this space. 

2PFLOPS HPC 4 BP

In March, we mentioned Total's new supercomputer, delivering 2.3 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second). Now BP is building something comparable in Houston, aiming for 2 petaflops and 536 terabytes of RAM. To build it, the company has allocated 0.1 gigadollars to high-performance computing over the next 5 years.

Haralick textures for everyone

Matt wrote about OpendTect's new texture attributes just before Christmas, but the news is so exciting that we wanted to mention it again. It's exciting because Haralick textures are among the most interesting and powerful of multi-trace attributes — right up there with coherency and curvature. Their appearance in the free and open-source core of OpendTect is great news for interpreters.

That's it for 2012... see you in 2013! Happy New Year.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Except OpendTect, which we definitely do endorse.

News of the month

News from the interface between the infinite istropic half-spaces of geoscience and technology. Got tips? 

Matt was at the SEG Annual Meeting in Las Vegas at the beginning of the month. If you didn't make the trip, and even if you did, Don't miss his highlights posts.

Webapp for wells

This is exciting. Subsurfr could be the start of a much-needed and long-overdue wave of rapid web innovation for petrotechnical tools. Much kudos to tiny Wellstorm Development for the bold initiative; it makes you wonder what on earth Halliburton and Schlumberger are up to. Right from your browser, you can fly around the subsurface of North Dakota, see logs, add picks, build surface segments, and provide the creators with feedback. Try it out!

OpendTect gets even awesomer 

OpendTect goes from strength to strength, having passed 100 000 downloads on about 11 November. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. It's like all those other integrated volume interpretation tools, with the small difference that it's open source-you can read the code. Oh, and it's free. There is that.

Paul de Groot, one of the founders of dGB, told me at SEG that he's been tinkering with code again. He's implemented GLCM-based texture attributes, and it will be in the open source base package soon. Nice.

The next big thing

Landmark's PowerCalculator was good. Geocraft was awesome. Now there's Canopy - Enthought's attempt to bring Python coding to the rest of us. The idea is to provide a MATLAB-like environment for the galaxy of mathematical and scientific computing packs for Python (numpy, scipy, matplotlib, to name a few). It's in beta right now — why not ask for an invite? Even more exiciting for geophysicists — Enthought is developing a set of geoscience plugins, allowing you to load SEGY data, display seismic, and perform other nifty tricks. Can't wait.

More Nova Scotia exploration

BP won licenses in the latest offshore exploration round (NS12–1), in exchange for a $1.05 billion work bid on 4 deep water parcels. This is in line with Shell's winning bid last January of $970 million, and they also added to their acreage — it seems there's an exploration renaissance happening in Nova Scotia. After the award, there were lots of questions about BP's safety record, but the licensing rules only allow for the highest bidder to win — there's no scrutiny of suitability at this stage. Awarding the license and later denying the right to drill seems a bit disingenuous, however. Water depth: up to about 3500 m!

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Except OpendTect and Canopy, because they are awesome and we use them almost every day.

Update on 2012-11-29 13:58 by Matt Hall

Students... take the FIELD challenge!

This news just in (thanks Jesper!) — I knew all about the AAPG Imperial Barrel Award, but hadn't heard of EAGE's equivalent before — the FIELD Challenge. Applications must be in by 15 December. 

The tepidity of social responsibility

Like last year, the 2012 SEG Forum was the only organized event on the morning of Day 1. And like last year, it was thinly attended. The title wasn't exactly enticing — Corporate and Academic Social Responsibility: Engagement or Estrangement — and to be honest I had no idea what we were in for. This stuff borders on sociology, and there's plenty of unfamiliar jargon. Some highlights:  

• Part of our responsibility to society is professional excellence — Isabelle Lambert
• At least one company now speaks of a 'privilege', not 'license', to operate — Isabelle Lambert
• Over-regulation is harmful, but we need them to promote disclosure and transparency — Steve Silliman
• The cheapest, easiest way to look like you care is to actually care

What they said

Mary Lou Zoback of Stanford moderated graciously throughout, despite being clearly perturbed by the thin audience. Jonathan Nyquist of Temple University was first up, and told how he is trying to get things done with $77k/year grad students using $50k grants when most donors want results not research.

Isabelle Lambert of CGGVeritas (above) eloquently described the company's principles. They actually seem to walk the walk: they were the only corporation to reply to the invitation to this forum, they seem very self-aware and open on the issue, and they have a policy of 'no political donations' — something that undermines a lot of what certain companies say about the environment, according to one questioner. 

Steve Silliman of Gonzaga University, a hydrologist, stressed the importance of the long-term view. One of his most successful projects has taken 14 years to reach its most impactful work, and has required funding from a wide range of sources — he had a terrific display of exactly when and how all this funding came in. 

Finally Michael Oxman, of Business for Social Responsibility, highlighted some interesting questions about stakeholder engagement, such as 'What constitues informed consultation?', and 'What constritutes consent?'. He was on the jargony end of things, so I got a bit lost after that.

What do you think, is social responsibility part of the culture where you work? Should it be? 

A footnote about the forum

"Social responsibility has become a popular topic these days", proclaimed the program. Not that popular, it turned out, with less than 2% of delegates showing up. Perhaps this is just the wrong venue for this particular conversation — Oxman pointed out that there is plenty of engagement in more specific venues. But maybe there's another reason for the dearth — this expert-centric, presentation-driven format felt dated somehow. Important people on stage, the unwashed, unnamed masses asking questions at the end. There was a nod to modernity: you could submit questions via Twitter or email, as well as on cards. But is this format, this approach to engagement, dead?

There's nothing to lose: let's declare it dead right now and promise ourselves that the opening morning of SEG in 2013 will be something to get our teeth into.

News of the month

Another month flies by, and it's time for our regular news round-up! News tips, anyone?

Knowledge sharing

At the start of the month, SPE launched PetroWiki. The wiki has been seeded with one part of the 7-volume Petroleum Engineering Handbook, a tome that normally costs over $600. They started with Volume 2, Drilling Engineering, which includes lots of hot topics, like fracking (right). Agile was involved in the early design of the wiki, which is being built by Knowledge Reservoir. 

Agile stuff

Our cheatsheets are consistenly some of the most popular things on our site. We love them too, so we've been doing a little gardening — there are new, updated editions of the rock physics and geophysics cheatsheets.

Thank you so much to the readers who've let us know about typos! 

Wavelets

Nothing else really hit the headlines this month — perhaps people are waiting for SEG. Here are some nibbles...

• We just upgraded a machine from Windows to Linux, sadly losing Spotfire in the process. So we're on the lookout for another awesome analytics tool. VISAGE isn't quite what we need, but you might like these nice graphs for oil and gas.
• Last month we missed the newly awarded exploration licenses in the inhospitable Beaufort Sea [link opens a PDF]. Franklin Petroleum of the UK might have been surprised by the fact that they don't seem to have been bidding against anyone, as they picked up all six blocks for little more than the minimum bid.
• It's the SEG Annual Meeting next week... and Matt will be there. Look out for daily updates from the technical sessions and the exhibition floor. There's at least one cool new thing this year: an app!

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

My StrataConf highlights

Lots went on at the geologically named, but not geologically inclined, Strata Conference in London. Here are my highlights:

George Dyson was one of the keynote speakers on the first morning. The son of the British–American mathematician Freeman Dyson, George is an author and historian of science and computing. He talked about the history of storage, starting with tally sticks, through the 53kB of global digital storage in 1953, to today. His talk was fascinating. 

Simon Rogers was one of several speakers from the Guardian newspaper, one of the most progressive and online-friendly news outlets in the world. The paper has a host of strategies for putting data first:

• Their data and viz geeks sit in the middle of news room
• They built their own software library for data viz, Miso
• They share the data behind every story on their Datablog

Duncan Irving from Teradata gave the audience a glimpse of the big data geoscientists wield, as I alluded to yesterday. Teradata does data warehousing, but with high technology extras like distributed storage and level of detail layers. I was intrigued by one of the technologies he talked about — SQL on Hadoop. This sounds like gobbledygook, but here's the (possibly horribly misunderstood) gist: store statistical attributes of a massive seismic volume in a database, then you can query them. "Show me all the traces with such-and-such seismic facies."   

Hjalmar Gislason from Datamarket, whose recent products include Energy Portal, gave us his best practices for publishing data:

• Use simple formats, like CSV
• Aim for at least 3 stars in Tim Berners-Lee's system
• Be consistent across the datasets you publish
• Put unique IDs everywhere, especially on tables and columns
• Provide FAQs and clear feedback channels for users
• Be clear about the license terms of the data

Ben Goldacre, author and bad science crimefighter, gave a keynote on the second day. Almost vibrating with energy, he described how the most basic bias-fighting tool in medicine — randomized controlled trials — might be applied to improving government services (Haynes et al., 2012, Test, learn, adapt). 

At the end of the two days, I had the usual feeling of fullness, fatigue, and anticlimax... but also the inspired, impatient, creative energy that I hope for from events. The consistency of the themes was encouraging — data wants to be free, visualization is necessary but insufficient, reproducibility is core, stories drive us — these are ideas we embrace. They're at the heart of the quiet revolution going on in the world, but perhaps not yet at the heart of our subsurface professional communities. 

Photo by flickr user bjelkeman.