Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree

I expect you know at least one geoscientist. Maybe you are one. Or you want to be one. Or you want one for Christmas. It doesn't matter. The point is, it'll soon be Christmas. If you're going to buy someone a present, you might as well get them something cool. So here's some cool stuff!

Gadgets

There isn't a single geologist alive that wouldn't think this was awesome. It's a freaking Geiger counter! It goes in your pocket! It only costs USD 60, or CAD 75, or less than 40 quid! Absurd: these things normally cost a lot more.

OK, if you didn't like that, you're not going to like this IR spectrometer. Yes, a pocket molecular sensor, for sensing molecules in pockets. It does cost USD 250 though, so make sure you really like that geologist!

Back down to earth, a little USB microscope ticks most of the geogeek boxes. This one looks awesome, and is only USD 40 but there are loads, so maybe do some research.

Specimens

You're going to need something to wave all that gadgetry at. If you go down the well-worn path of the rock & mineral set, make sure it's a good size, like this 100-sample monster (USD 70). Or go for the novelty value of fluorescent specimens (USD 45) — calcite, sphalerite, and the like.

If minerals seem passé for a geologist, then take the pure line with a tour of the elements. This set — the last of it's kind, by the way — costs USD 565, but it looks amazing. Yet it can't hold a candle to this beauty, all USD 5000 of it — which I badly want but let's face it will never get.

Home

If you have a rock collection, maybe you want a mineralogical tray (USD 35) to put them in? The same store has all sorts of printed fabrics by designers Elena Kulikova and Karina Eibitova. Or how about some bedding?

These steampunk light switch plates are brilliant and varied (USD 50). Not geological at all, just awesome.

I don't think they are for sale, but check out Ohio artist Alan Spencer's ceramic pieces reflecting each of the major geological periods. They're pretty amazing.

Lego

My kids are really into Lego at the moment. Turns out there are all sorts of sciencey kits you can get. I think the Arctic Base Camp (USD 90) is my favourite that's available at the moment, and it contains some kind of geological-looking type (right).

I don't condone the watching of television programmes, except Doctor Who obviously, but they do sometimes make fun Lego sets. So there's the Doctor, naturally, and other things like Big Bang Theory.

You can fiddle with these while you wait for the awesome HMS Beagle model to come out.

Books etc.

A proven success — winner of the Royal Society's prestigious Winton Prize for science books this year — is Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made, by Gaia Vince, Milkweed Editions, September 2015. Available in hardback and paperback.

Lisa Randall's Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (HarperCollins) just came out, and is doing remarkably well at the moment. It's getting decent reviews too. Randall is a cosmologist, and she reckons the dinosaurs were obliterated by a comet nudged out of orbit by mysteriousness. Hardback only.

If those don't do it for you, I reviewed some sciencey comic books recently... or there's always Randall Munroe.

Or you could try poking around in the giftological posts from 2011, 2012, 2013, or 2014.

Still nothing? OK, well, there's always chocolate :)

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The images in this post are all someone else's copyright and are used here under fair use guidelines. I'm hoping the owners are cool with people helping them sell stuff!

The big data eye-roll

First, let's agree on one thing: 'big data' is a half-empty buzzword. It's shorthand for 'more data than you can look at', but really it's more than that: it branches off into other hazy territory like 'data science', 'analytics', 'deep learning', and 'machine intelligence'. In other words, it's not just 'large data'. 

Anyway, the buzzword doesn't bother me too much. What bothers me is when I talk to people at geoscience conferences about 'big data', about half of them roll their eyes and proclaim something like this: "Big data? We've been doing big data since before these punks were born. Don't talk to me about big data."

This is pretty demonstrably a load of rubbish.

What the 'big data' movement is trying to do is not acquire loads of data then throw 99% of it away. They are not processing it in a purely serial pipeline, making arbitrary decisions about parameters on the way. They are not losing most of it in farcical enterprise data management train-wrecks. They are not locking most of their data up in such closed systems that even they don't know they have it.

They are doing the opposite of all of these things.

If you think 'big data', 'data' science' and 'machine learning' are old hat in geophysics, then you have some catching up to do. Sure, we've been toying with simple neural networks for years, eg probabilistic neural nets with 1 hidden layer — though this approach is very, very far from being mainstream in subsurface — but today this is child's play. Over and over, and increasingly so in the last 3 years, people are showing how new technology — built specifically to handle the special challenge that terabytes bring — can transform any quantitative endeavour: social media and online shopping, sure, but also astronomy, robotics, weather prediction, and transportation. These technologies will show up in petroleum geoscience and engineering. They will eat geostatistics for breakfast. They will change interpretation.

So when you read that Google has open sourced its TensorFlow deep learning library (9 November), or that Microsoft has too (yesterday), or that Facebook has too (months ago), or that Airbnb has too (in August), or that there are a bazillion other super easy-to-use packages out there for sophisticated statistical learning, you should pay a whole heap of attention! Because machine learning is coming to subsurface.

Moving ahead with social interpretation

After quietly launching Pick This — our social image interpretation tool — in February, we've been busily improving the tool and now we're moving into 2016 with a plan for world domination. I summed up the first year of development in one of the interpretation sessions at SEG 2015. Here's a 13-minute version of my talk:

In 2016 we'll be exploring ways to adapt the tool to in-house corporate use, mainly by adding encryption and private groups. This way, everyone with @awesome.com email addresses, say, would be connected to each other, and their stuff would only be shared among the group, not with the general public.

Some other functionality is on the list of things to do:

• Other types of interpretation than points, lines and polygons.
  
• Ways to find content more easily, for example with tags like 'Seismic' or 'Outcrop'.
  
• Ways to follow individuals, or get notifications of new interpretations on an image.
  
• More ways to visualize and generally get at the data Pick This produces.
  

We're always open to suggestions. Please get in touch if you have a neat idea!