Plant a seed for science and tech

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

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.

Update on 2013-12-18 13:21 by Matt Hall

If you're still stuck, don't miss this epic list on Geolog, the official blog of the EGU. (And while you're at it, do check out their blog network).

Update on 2013-12-22 22:10 by Matt Hall

...and Evelyn Mervine has put up her 2013 installment — class and quality, as per.

52 Things is out!

The new book is out! You can now order it from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon in Europe, and it will be available soon from Amazon.ca and various other online bookstores.

What's it about? I sent Andrew Miall some chapters at the proof stage; here's what he said:

Geology is all about rocks, and rocks are all about detail and field context, and about actually being out there at that critical outcrop, right THERE, that proves our point. The new book 52 Things You Should Know About Geology is full of practical tips, commentary, and advice from real geologists who have been there and know what the science is all about.

Amazing authors

A massive thank you to my 41 amazing co-authors...

Eight of these people also wrote in 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics; the other 34 are new to this project. Between them, this crowd has over 850 years of experience in geoscience (more remarkably, just two of them account for 100 years!). Half of the authors are primarily active in North America; others are in the UK, Germany, Indonesia, India, the Netherlands, and Norway. Ten are engaged in academia, four of them as students. The diversity is wonderful as far as it goes, but the group is overwhelmingly composed of white men; it's clear we still have work to do there. 

We have the globe mostly covered in the essays themselves too. Regrettably, we have gaping holes over South America and most of Africa. We will endeavour to fix this in future books. This map shows page numbers...

Giving back

Academic publishing is a fairly marginal business, because the volumes are so small. Furthermore, we are committed to offering books at consumer, not academic, prices. The 42 authors have shown remarkable generosity of time and spirit in drafting these essays for the community at large. If you enjoy their work, I'm certain they'd love to hear about it.

In part to recognize their efforts, and to give something back to the community that supports these projects (that's you!), we approached the AAPG Foundation and offered to donate $2 from every sale to the charity. They were thrilled about this — and we look forward to helping them bring geoscience to more young people.

These books are all about sharing — sharing knowledge and sharing stories. These are the things that make our profession the dynamic, sociable science that it is. If you would like to order 10 or more copies for your friends, students, or employees, do get in touch and we will save you some money.

Great geophysicists #10: Joseph Fourier

Joseph Fourier, the great mathematician, was born on 21 March 1768 in Auxerre, France, and died in Paris on 16 May 1830, aged 62. He's the reason I didn't get to study geophysics as an undergraduate: Fourier analysis was the first thing that I ever struggled with in mathematics.

Fourier was one of 12 children of a tailor, and had lost both parents by the age of 9. After studying under Lagrange at the École Normale Supérieure, Fourier taught at the École Polytechnique. At the age of 30, he was an invited scientist on Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, along with 55,000 other men, mostly soldiers:

Citizen, the executive directory having in the present circumstances a particular need of your talents and of your zeal has just disposed of you for the sake of public service. You should prepare yourself and be ready to depart at the first order.
Herivel, J (1975). Joseph Fourier: The Man and the Physicist, Oxford Univ. Press.

He stayed in Egypt for two years, helping found the modern era of Egyptology. He must have liked the weather because his next major work, and the one that made him famous, was Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822), on the physics of heat. The topic was incidental though, because it was really his analytical methods that changed the world. His approach of decomposing arbitrary functions into trignometric series was novel and profoundly useful, and not just for solving the heat equation. 

Fourier as a geophysicist

Late last year, Evan wrote about the reason Fourier's work is so important in geophysical signal processing in Hooray for Fourier! He showed how we can decompose time-based signals like seismic traces into their frequency components. And I touched the topic in K is for Wavenumber (decomposing space) and The spectrum of the spectrum (decomposing frequency itself, which is even weirder than it sounds). But this GIF (below) is almost all you need to see both the simplicity and the utility of the Fourier transform. 

In this example, we start with something approaching a square wave (red), and let's assume it's in the time domain. This wave can be approximated by summing the series of sine waves shown in blue. The amplitudes of the sine waves required are the Fourier 'coefficients'. Notice that we needed lots of time samples to represent this signal smoothly, but require only 6 Fourier coefficients to carry the same information. Mathematicians call this a 'sparse' representation. Sparsity is a handy property because we can do clever things with sparse signals. For example, we can compress them (the basis of the JPEG scheme), or interpolate them (as in CGG's REVIVE processing). Hooray for Fourier indeed.

The watercolour caricature of Fourier is by Julien-Leopold Boilly from his work Album de 73 Portraits-Charge Aquarelle’s des Membres de I’Institute (1820); it is in the public domain.

Read more about Fourier on his Wikipedia page — and listen to this excellent mini-biography by Marcus de Sautoy. And check out Mostafa Naghizadeh's chapter in 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics. Download the chapter for free!

52 Things... About Geology

Welcome to the new book from Agile Libre! The newest, friendliest, awesomest book about petroleum geoscience. 

The book will be out later in November, pending review of the proof, but you can pre-order it now from Amazon.com at their crazy offer price of only $13.54. When it comes out, the book will hit Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, and other online booksellers.

63 weeks to mature

It's truly a privilege to publish these essays. When an author hands over a manuscript, they are trusting the publisher and editors to do justice not just to the words, but to the thoughts inside. And since it's impossible to pay dozens of authors, they did it all for nothing. To recognize their contributions to the community, we're donating $2 from every book sale to the AAPG Foundation. Perhaps the students that benefit from the Foundation will go on to share what they know. 

This book took a little stamina, compared to 52 Things... Geophysics. We started inviting authors on 1 July 2012, and it took 442 days to get all the essays. As before, the first one came almost immediately; this time it was from George Pemberton, maintaining the tradition of amazing people being great champions for these projects. Indeed, Tony Doré — another star contributor — was a big reason the book got finished.

What's inside?

To whet your appetite, here are the first few chapters from the table of contents:

• Advice for a prospective geologist — Mark Myers, 14th Director of the USGS
• As easy as 1D, 2D, 3D — Nicholas Holgate, Aruna Mannie, and Chris Jackson
• Computational geology — Mark Dahl, exploration geologist at ConocoPhillips
• Coping with uncertainty — Duncan Irving at TeraData
• Geochemical alchemy — Richard Hardman, exploration legend
• Geological inversion — Evan Bianco of Agile
• Get a helicopter not a hammer — Alex Cullum of Statoil

Even this short list samples some of the breadth of topics, and the range of experience of the contributors. Nichlas and Aruna are PhD students of Chris Jackson at Imperial College London, and Richard Hardman is a legend on the UK exploration scene, with over 50 years of experience. Between them, the 42 authors have notched up over 850 career-years — the book is a small window into this epic span of geological thinking.

We're checking the proofs right now. The book should be out in about 2 weeks, just in time for St Barbara's day!

Pre-order now from Amazon.com 
Save more than 25% off the cover price!
It's $13.54 today, but Amazon sets the final price... I don't know how long the offer will last.