Looking forward to AAPG

Today we're en route to the AAPG Annual Convention & Exhibition (the ACE) in Houston. We have various things going on before it and after it too, so we're in Houston for 10 days of geoscience. Epic!

The appetizers

On Friday we're hosting a 'learning geoscience programming' bootcamp at START, our favourite Houston coworking space. Then we roll straight into our weekend programming workshop — Rock Hack — also at START. Everyone is welcome — programming newbies, established hackers. We want to build tools for working with well logs. You don't need any special skills, just ideas. Bring whatever you have! We'll be there from 8 am on Saturday. (Want more info?)

At least come for the breakfast tacos.

Conference highlight forecast

Regular readers will know that I'm a bit of a jaded conference-goer. But I haven't been to AAPG since Calgary in 2005, and I am committed to reporting the latest in geoscience goodness — so I promise to go to some talks and report back on this very blog. I'm really looking forward to it since Brian Romans whet my appetite with a round-up of his group's research offerings last week. 

I thought I'd share what else I'll be trying to get to. I can't find a way to link to the abstracts — you'll have to hunt them down in the Itinerary Planner... 

  • Monday am. Communicating our science. Jim Reilly, Iain Stewart, and others.
  • Monday pm. Case Studies of Geological and Geophysical Integration sounds okay, but might under-deliver. And there's a talk called 3-D Printing Artificial Reservoir Rocks to Test Their Petrophysical Properties, by Sergey Ishutov that should be worth checking out.
  • Tuesday am.  Petroleum Geochemistry and Source Rock Characterization, in honour of Wally Dow
  • Tuesday pm. Turbidites and Contourites, Room 360, is the place to be. Zane Jobe is your host.
  • Wednesday am. I'll probably end up in Seismic Visualization of Hydrocarbon Play Fairways.
  • Wednesday pm. Who can resist Space and Energy Frontiers? Not me.

That's about it. I'm teaching my geoscience writing course at a client's offices on Friday, then heading home. Evan will be hanging out and hacking some more I expect. Expect some updates to modelr.io!

If you're reading this, and you will be at AAPG — look out for us! We'll be the ones sitting on the floor near electrical outlets, frantically typing blog posts.