Newsflash: the Geophysics Hackathon is back!

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Mark your calendar: 22–24 September (right before SEG), at a downtown Houston location to be confirmed.

We're filling the room with 50 geoscientists of all stripes. Interpreters, programmers, students, professionals... everyone is welcome. The plan: to imagine, design, and prototype some new tools in geophysics — all around the theme of machine learning. It's going to be awesome. 

The schedule: we'll get started at 6 pm on Friday 22 September, and go till 10 pm. Then we pick it up again on Saturday morning, and go till 6 pm, and the same again on Sunday. Teams will present a demo to everyone on Sunday after 3 pm. There will be a few prizes, a few drinks, lots of food, and a lot of new geophysical tools and widgets. 

If you want to know more about what a hackathon is, read my summary from the last one: Le grand hack! Or check out the project round-up posts, part 1 and part 2.

If you're not sure you belong, I promise that you do. One of the prize-winning teams in Paris had no coding experience! And every team needs help with brainstorming, design, testing, and presentation. Absolutely anyone can contribute, and absolutely everyone will learn something.

If you have some like-minded friends, bring them along! We need teams of 5 people, so if there are already 5 of you, you can start coding as soon as you walk in the door!

If you can't be there yourself, please share this post with someone you know.

When you're ready, click here to buy a ticket.

Thank you as always to our sponsors so far: Dell EMC and Amazon AWS. If you'd like to sponsor the Houston event, please check this page out, or just get in touch.

Another fossil book

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I'm thrilled to introduce the latest book in the 52 Things series!

52 More Things You Should Know About Palaeontology is out. You can buy it direct from us, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and it will soon be available all over the world via Amazon's other stores.

In common with all the books from Agile Libre, it is a scholarly text with some weird features. For example:

  • It's fun and easy to read. Each of the 52 essays is only about 700 words long.
  • It costs $19, not $49 (I am not making that $49 up. Welcome to academic publishing!)
  • It's openly licensed, so you can re-use any of the content with attribution but without permission.
  • $2 from every sale goes to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology to support their work.

A book for everyone

Like the first 52 Things on fossils, it's not just for palaeontologists. No matter who you are, I hereby guarantee that you'll find something useful and interesting in there, or your money back. I mean, just look at some of these chapters:

  • A closer look at fossil sex, by Benni Bomfleur & Hans Kerp — in flagrante!
  • A snake with four legs, by David Martill — chronic limb loss!
  • Birds of a fibula, by Jon Tennant — dino bones!
  • Fossils for sale, by Tony Doré, OBE, of Statoil — selling shells!
  • Gods and monsters, by Andrew Taylor — miracles!
  • How kangaroos got their bounce, by Benjamin P Kear — just so!
  • Impossible frogs in the Deccan Traps, by Michael Oates — igneous fossils!
  • In search of the Balearian mouse goat, by Alun Williams — mouse goats!
  • Interview with a Triceratops, by John Scanella — dinosaurs forever!
  • Micro-dung and its uses, by Wyn Hughes — tiny poo!
  • Traces in the terrarium, by Daniel Hembree — experimental ichnology!
  • Vertebrate palaeontology: more than fossil bones, by John Hutchinson — see dino run!

A huge thanks to the 50(!) authors of this volume. Together, I estimate they have over 1000 years of experience to share. Imagine that for a moment. All that learning, centuries in the field, decades in the library, or squinting down microscopes... just to write an essay for you! 

Massive thanks as well to Alex Cullum and Allard Martinius, both of Statoil. It takes a good deal of tenacity to rally 50 people to do anything, let alone write a book together... and they've done it twice. And they've nailed it again — check out what Prof David Polly (Indiana), president of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology had to say about the book:

“[It] looks fantastic. There is a lot of useful and high-level information in it, plus it is entertaining to read. I’m also pleased to see several SVP members in the author list. It deserves to be a great success. (The other books in the series are equally wonderful... having worked with eigenvectors daily for decades, I nevertheless learned something from Ruelicke’s chapter in the Geology volume.)”

I hope you enjoy the book too!

Have you read 52 Things... Rock Physics? If you enjoyed it, or even if you didn't, we'd love a short review on Amazon.com :) Help spread some geophysics goodness.

Fear and loathing in oil & gas

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Sometimes you have to swallow your fear. This is one of those times.

The proliferation of 3D seismic in the 1980s was a major step forward for the petroleum industry. However, it took more than a decade for the 3D seismic method to become popular. During that decade, seismic equipment continued to evolve, particularly with the advent of telemetry recording systems that needed for doing 3D surveys offshore.

Things were never the same again. New businesses sprouted up to support it, and established service companies and tech companies exploded size and in order to keep up with the demand and all the new work.

Not so coincidently, another major shift happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the industry-wide shift to Sun workstations in order to cope with the crunching and rendering the overwhelming influx of all these digits. UNIX workstations with hilariously large cathode-ray tube monitors became commonplace. This industry helped make Sun and many other IT companies very wealthy, and once again everything was good. At least until Sun's picnic was trampled on by Linux workstations in the early 2000s, but that's another story...

I think the advent of 3D seismic is one of many examples of the upstream oil and gas industry thriving on technological change. 3D seismic changed everything, facilitating progress in the full sense of the word and we never looked back. As an early career geoscientist, I don't know what the world was like before 3D seismic, but I have interpreted 2D data and I know it's an awful experience — even on a computer.

Debilitating skepticism?

Today, in 2017, we find ourselves in the middle of the next major transformation. Like 3D seismic before it, machine learning will alter yesterday's landscape beyond all recognition. We've been through all of this before, but this time, for some reason it feels different. Many people are cautious, unconvinced about whether this next thing will live up to the hype. Other people are vibrating with excitement viewing the whole thing with rose-coloured glasses. Still others truly believe that it will fail — assertively rejecting hopes and over-excited claims that yes, artificial intelligence will catapult us into a better world, a world beyond our wildest dreams.

A little skepticism is healthy, but I meet a lot of people who are so skeptical about this next period of change that they are ignoring it. It feels to me like an unfair level of dismissal, a too-rigid stance. And it has left me rather perplexed: Why is there so much resistance and denial this time around? Why the apprehension?

I'll wager the reason it is different this time because this change is happening to us, in spite of us, whether we like it or not. We're not in the driving seat. Most of us aren't even in the passenger seat. Unlike seismic technology and UNIX|Linux workstations, our sector has had little to do with this revolution. We haven't been pushing for it, instead, it is dragging us along with it. Worse, it's happening fast; even the people who are trying to keep up with it can barely hold on. 

We need you

This is the opportunity of a lifetime. It's happening. High time to crank up the excitement, get involved, be a part of it. I for one want you to be part of it. Come along with us. We need you, whether you like it or not. 

This post was provoked by a conversation on LinkedIn.