Modern illuminations

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages blended words and images, continuing traditions established by the Ancient Egyptians. Words and pictures go together: one without the other is a rather flat experience, like silent cinema, or eating fine food with a cold. This is why I like comic books so much. 

One of the opening sessions on Day 1 at the recent ScienceOnline conference was an hour with sketchnoter and überdoodler Perrin Ireland of Alphachimp Studio. She basically gave away all her secrets for purposeful scientific doodling. Tips like building a canon of fonts, practising icons and dividing lines, and honing an eye for the deft use of colour. 

The result... well, I had a lot of fun scribing talks. Two of them I managed to get to a point we might call al dente, or maybe half baked. The first from a session on open notebook science, something that interests me quite a bit: 

If it looks like you have to really listen and concentrate to produce one of these, that's because you do. I did miss bits, though, as I fretted over important things like what kind of robot to draw. And you might have noticed that I can't draw people. Yeah, I noticed that too. It didn't stop me adding them to the next one, from a session on the semantic web:

I'm not alone in my happiness at finding this sketchy new world. Perrin has given her perspective, and Michele Arduengo has written a lovely post about learning to draw science, and you can see many of the other efforts in this awesome Flickr gallery—the scratchings of amateurs like me sit half-convincingly alongside the professional pieces, and together I think they're rather wonderful.

Amenhotep image from Flickr user wallyg, licensed BY-NC-ND. All Flickr slideshow images are copyright of their respective creators, and may be subject to restrictions. All my work is licensed CC-BY.

The blog post

People sometimes eye Evan and I with suspicion when they ask about what we do. Even after a whole year of Agile, I admit I am sometimes at a loss for a snappy answer. In a nutshell, I'd say:

We solve geoscience problems for geoscientists. We like fast and useful solutions, not perfect or expensive solutions—we don't believe in perfect or expensive solutions. We love the things you might not have time for: data, technology, and documentation.

Above all, we love to help people. And that's what the blog is for: we want to be useful, mostly relevant, perhaps interesting, occasionally insightful. And we live on the edge of the continent and don't want to fall off, small and forgotten, into the North Atlantic. For us, the blog is a portal to Houston, Calgary, Aberdeen, Perth, and the rest of our world.

Is it worth it? Well, that depends how you measure 'worth it'. I reckon we spend 8 to 16 hours on an average of 3 weekly posts to the blog, so it's a substantial investment for us. A lot of it ends up in the wiki, or in a paper, or elsewhere; it's definitely a good catalyst for thinking, making useful stuff, and starting conversations. I don't think the blog has generated business purely on its own yet, but it has helped keep our profile up, and made us easier to find. 

Who reads it? We don't know for sure, but we have some clues. Our website has been visited almost exactly 30 000 times this year. We currently get about 800 visits a week, from about 550 unique visitors (shown in the chart above). Of those, about 30% are in the US, 20% are in Canada, 9% in the UK, then it's Australia, Germany, India, and Norway. The list contains 136 countries. This last fact alone fills us with joy, even if it's wrong by a factor of two.

How do the readers find us? About 140 people subscribe to our feed by email, which means they get an email alert the morning after we publish a post. Each week, only about 20 people come to us via Google, with search terms like seismic rock physics, agile geophysics, and tight gas vs shale gas. Since we announce new posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and now Google+ too), we get visitors from those sources too: they send about 24%, 18%, and 6% of our traffic respectively (G+ has too little data). The average visitor looks at 2.2 pages and stays for 3 mins and 2 seconds. But hey, 3 minutes is a long time on the Internet. Right?

If you were looking for some juicy geoscience, not this navel gazing, then check out our recent Greatest Hits, and have an amazing New Year! See you in 2012.

Blog traffic data are summarized from Google Analytics and are for interest only—the data are prone to all sorts of errors and artifacts. What's more, I do not have data for the first 6 weeks or so of traffic. Pinches of salt all round.

2011 retrospective

The year is almost over so we thought we'd highlight some of our favourite and our most popular posts from the year. We've posted something like 150 or so missives to this blog this year — nothing to boast about, but when we look over our work we do feel like we've achieved something. We've made a lot of new friends and acquaintances, which has been the greatest part of it. We've also learnt a lot about geoscience, especially when we've posted things at the edges of our knowledge... luckily we don't mind learning in plain sight! 

Most popular

One of the eye-opening things about running a website is the incredible statistics available from Google Analytics. There's no personal information, of course, but where readers clicked from, what they read, and for how long, where they went next, what browser they use... and that doesn't scratch the surface. After the main page, the most popular stops are: 

• Downloads (people want stuff!)
• About Us
• Articles — various scribblings and talks
• Evan's awesome Rock Physics Cheatsheet
• Our reading list
• The apps page
• The cheatsheets in general

After the cheatsheet posts, the most-visited posts are:

• The scales of geoscience, about being helicoptery
• Shale vs tight, about the differences between shale gas and tight gas reservoirs
• What is unconventional?, about ways to define unconventional resources
• Are you a poet or a mathematician?, about the language of uncertainty

Most commented

I have not been very rigorous and filtered our own comments here—we try to respond to every comment. Except the comments about Paul Smith shoes and Breitling watches, which I delete immediately (if you don't have a blog, you are perhaps blissfully unaware of the tedious amount of robo-spam that blogs and wikis attract—lucky for you!). Apart from the Where on (Google) Earth game posts, some of the most commented posts were:

• Wherefore art thou, Expert?, about coping without them
• Geophysical stamps 3: Geophone, mainly because of my mistake!
• Why we should embrace openness, about being less secretive in appled geoscience
• The simultaneity funnel, about the process of invention

Most favourite

Evan and I have posts we loved to write and share. For what it's worth, here they are:

Evan	Matt
Species identification in the rock kingdom	Pseudogeophysics
The Rock Physics Workshop series	Things not to think
Shattering shale	Learn to program

That's it! It's almost the end of a hair-raising year for both Evan and I, and one of the most satisfying parts of it has been meeting and conversing with you, dear reader. Thank you for investing your attention in us now and then.

And have a wonderful Christmas, Newtonmas, or whatever you celebrate round your way. Cheers!

Review: Communicating Rocks

Communicating Rocks by Peter Copeland
Pearson Education, July 2011, 160 pages

Visit Amazon.comI heard about this new book for geo-writers at the SEG Annual Meeting. I was there to teach a one-day course on technical writing for geoscientists, so naturally I ordered the book immediately. I've been leafing through it for about a month now and here's my verdict: I quite like it. Too wishy-washy? OK, I really like the contents. I really don't like the physical book. At all.

Why so bristly? Full disclosure: I love books. I know my recto from my verso, so to speak. Seeing a book typeset in Times and Arial makes me sad. Witnessing a publisher using the world's cheapest paper, flimsiest cardstock, and laughable page layout, I start to wonder if it's true what they say about the end of days for the medium. When they go on to charge $38 for such a book, I know it's true what they say about academic publishers gouging their customers.

None of this is author Peter Copeland's fault, and of course none of it really changes the message he wants to convey: writing matters. More particularly, your writing matters. Reading this short book, squarely aimed at and tailored for academic geoscientists, will make a difference to your writing. That's why it's on our recommended reading list.

I think it's fair to say that Copeland, a professor at the University of Houston, holds rather traditional views about writing. The first chapter, Communication equals thinking, is essentially a good-natured, 4000-word rant about the importance of writing well. He quotes the relatively tolerant George Orwell and the slightly-less-tolerant Lynne Truss, but gets quite worked up about the difference between forbid and prohibit, and sand and sandstone. I'm all for rigour and precision, but I do think there are contexts in which we can afford to write more comfortably, without feeling like we are programming a computer when we write. And I worry that would-be writers find it intimidating.

The second section of Copeland's book, Written communication, is the nub. After a look at types of writing, focusing pointedly on academic papers, there is a 65-page A-to-Z covering all sorts of topics from technical words to ordinary ones, and from points of English grammar to special geologic and scientific issues. One of the best passages is on accuracy, precision and repeatability; I will certainly refer to this section again. The section is rounded off with a useful collection of how-not-to examples, with clear and pertinent commentary—another dog-ear. 

Section three covers oral and poster presentations: more solid advice that, if taken, will lead the reader to be a fine presenter of observations, interpretations and ideas. But the advice is conventional and I do wonder if there's a missed opportunity to inspire, perhaps tacitly permit, the gifted communicator to take the risk of giving a remarkable presentation.

The final part of the book, aptly entitled Writing is hard, is another short piece about the graft of writing. Copeland celebrates the sheer hard work of planning to write, grinding out the first draft, and then writing the words all over again to make them the ones you really wanted. All excellent, practical, realistic advice for the grad student especially. 

Having accused Copeland of being a bit strict, I'll reveal myself to be a complete hypocrite by saying that I looked for several of my favourite peeves (i.e. and e.g., or the correct use of significant and begs the question) only to find them missing. And there is at least one slip: a billion is certainly no longer 10¹² in the UK. The 15 or so colour figures are generally quite weak, the math typesetting is poor, and the tables are grim. Stranger still, Copeland likes pie charts:

Pie charts are a fine way of displaying the relative amounts of several components.

Sacrilege! Or perhaps the very fact that all writing ranters have their own pet peeves means that they are nothing more than just peeves: silly predilections that don't really matter. 

Broken ice

Click for the latest newsUntil today, I was an SEG virgin; I can now see what all the fuss is about.

The SEG Annual Meeting is big. Massive. And it feels important, or at least significant. It is clear that exploration geophysics lives here. Every step takes you past something cool... there's FairfieldNodal's seismic node exhibit, and here's Transform Software's stained-glass-window spectral display. And every other step is like flicking through an issue of Geophysics... there's Sergey Fomel, here's Öz Yilmaz. Although I know only a few people here, I have a stong feeling of familiarity and belonging. I like it. No: I love it.

I taught my writing course this morning. It was the smallest course in the world, with a grand total of three students of the written word. Fortunately, they turned out to be wonderful company, and taught me at least twice as much as I taught them. We spent much of the morning talking about new directions in science writing, openness in industry and academia, and the competition for attention. The SEG showed considerable faith in me and my subject matter in offering this course, because it has faltered before over the years. But clearly something needs to change if we agree to offer it again... It seems that honing soft skills is not what people are looking for. Perhaps a course like mine is better suited to online consumption in bite-size webcasts. Or maybe I just needed more elliptic partial differential equations.

What do you think of courses like this? Too fluffy? Too long? Too boring?

Click here for all the posts about SEG 2011

More on brevity

Yesterday, I wrote about one of Orwell's essays, and about Watson and Crick's famous letter to Nature. The theme: short expositions win. Today, I continue the theme, with two more brief but brilliant must-reads for the aspiring writer. 

Albert Einstein

The first time Einstein's equation appeared in printLike the Watson and Crick letter, Einstein's 1905 paper Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content? was profound and eternal. In it, he derived the expression m = E / c². Though the paper was arguably little more than an extension of others he published that year, it was very short: exactly three (small) pages long. His concluding remark couldn't be clearer or more succinct:

If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies.

Einstein's writing style was influenced by Ernst Mach's book, The Science of Mechanics (Minor, 1984). Mach adopted a pedagogic, step-by-step style that guided the reader through the scientist's reasoning. Asking the reader to imagine an analogous scenario or simplified example was, in my experience, common in physics books of the period. Richard Feynman used a similar straightforward style. I try to use it myself, but sometimes the desire to impress gets the better of me.

Kenneth Landes

Years of reviewing journal papers has convinced me: the abstract is one of the most abused and misunderstood animals of science. I regularly hand Landes' brilliant little plea to new writers, and it bears re-reading once every couple of years. Landes points out that the abstract should "concentrate in itself the essential information of a paper or article". Here is his superbly cheeky, information-free counterexample:

A partial biography of the writer is given. The inadequate abstract is discussed. What should be covered by an abstract is considered. The importance of the abstract is described. Dictionary definitions of 'abstract' are quoted. At the conclusion a revised abstract is presented. 

Read his short note for the improved version of this soggy squib of an abstract. 

What do we draw from these authors? I'll be brief: so should you.

References
Einstein, A (1905). Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energiegehalt abhängig?, in Annalen der Physik. 18:639, 1905. Published in English by Methuen, 1923.
Landes, K (1966). A scrutiny of the abstract II. American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin 50 (9), p 1992.
Mach, E (1883). The science of mechanics. Later English translation here. 
Minor, D (1984). Albert Einstein on writing. J. Technical Writing and Communication 14 (1), p 13–18. [Requires subscription or purchase]. 

On brevity

As another of my new endeavours for the year, I plan to teach a short course on writing. I have been researching the subject, looking for advice, examples and counter-examples. Some of my favourites come from the archives, where I expected to find only dusty obfuscation, written in the tortuous prose many people associate with science. Instead, I came across some tiny but glittering gems. Today: Orwell, and Watson & Crick. 

George Orwell

Orwell's short essay, Politics and the English Language, is partly about politics, but mostly about language. A little on the dusty side perhaps, at least to my taste, but it has two highlights. First, Orwell quotes some perverse paragraphs from the more pompous writers of the day, like this unreadable piffle from one scholar:

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Second, Orwell offers six rules to improve our writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Watson and Crick

One of the most important and widely recognized scientific publications of the last century turns out to be nothing more than a one-page letter. As well as being brief, it even reads like a letter, with plain language and plenty of opinion and informed speculation. Although the results were published in full elsewhere, doubtless in more technical language, and although letters are still used in some journals, I love the unselfconscious ease with which this seismic discovery was announced. If anyone is up for the challenge, it would be fun to parody a modern press-release for this discovery.

Click the thumbnail for the full paper →

Tomorrow, I offer two more short pieces to rev up your writing. Meanwhile... do you have any favourites from the archives of science writing? Please share them! Unless they're in Latin.

Rotten writing's rubbish, right?

Marked-up copy — effective copy editing is a useful skill for all scientists that writeI love teaching. I get a buzz from it. I don't know that I'm great at it, but I want to be great. As a student, I think I was quite reflective—both of my parents were teachers—and one of the great things about teaching is that you finally get to put your money where your mouth is. Every time you berated a teacher's boringness (behind their backs, obviously), or whined about how pointless an essay or lab exercise was (to your buddies), is now held up as a vivid and uncomfortable challenge. 

So late last year I got in touch with the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists (CSPG) and the US Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and offered a one-day short course. They both said they'd been wanting to offer something like it and, if enough people sign up for it, the course will run at least twice this year:

• at the CSPG convention in Calgary in May [course outline]
• at the SEG convention in San Antonio in September [course outline]

My worry is this: writing is like driving—most people think they're pretty good at it. But my course isn't just about style, it's also about tools, publishing, and getting things done. My two goals for the day are:

Get more people writing. Especially people from industry, who often excuse themselves from the global scientific community. 'I don't have the time' or 'My work's not interesting enough' are the things I hear. And maybe I'm a shallow, superficial kind of person, but I'm not so worried about high-brow, highly specialized, technical writing. There's plenty of that. I just want to see more grass-roots experience, stories, tutorials, field trip reports, how-to's, and what-I-did-at-the-weekend's. More community, in less traditional media.

Get people thinking about good style. Style has two aspects: the qualitative (what we might call interestingness) and the quantitative (correctness).  I don't claim to be the world's greatest writer myself, but I know what gets me good feedback in my work, and I have an eye for detail (did you notice the extra space back there? I did). I think there are two insidious notions out there about writing: science is serious business, and 'nit-picky' detail is not all that important. Both of these notions are nonsense.

If you were to take a writing skills course like this, what would you want to do or see? If you've done a course like this before and loved it (or not!), what can I learn from it? 

Apologies to Jon Agee for the title; his poem Rotten Writing, in his book Orangutan Tongs was the inspiration.

Geophysics cheatsheet

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first cheatsheet, with some basic science tables and reminders. The idea is that you print it out, stick it in the back of your notebook, and look like a genius and/or smart alec next time you're in a meeting and someone asks, "How long was the Palaeogene?" (21 Ma) or "Is the P50 the same as the Most Likely? I can never remember," (no, it's not).

Today I present the next instalment: a geophysics cheatsheet. It contains mostly basic stuff, and is aimed at the interpreter rather than the weathered processor or number-crunching seismic analyst. I have included Shuey's linear approximation of the Zoeppritz equations; it forms the basis for many simple amplitude versus offset (AVO) analyses. But there's also the Aki–Richards equation, which is often used in more advanced pre-stack AVO analysis. There are some reminders of typical rock properties, modes of seismic multiples, and seismic polarity. 

As before, if there's anything you think I've messed up, or wrongly omitted, please leave a comment. We will be doing more of these, on topics like rock physics, core description, and log analysis. Further suggestions are welcome!

← Click to download the PDF (1.6MB)

Basic cheatsheet

When I was a spotty schoolboy my favourite book was the Science Data Book. This amazing little book, which fit in my jacket pocket (we wore suits to school), went everywhere with me. Everywhere at school, I mean, I'm not that much of a nerd.

It contains some really handy stuff: the Greek alphabet, SI unit definitions, the periodic table, the fundamental constants, handy formulae like the Maclaurin series, (remember that?), and even a very nice table of isotopes (did you know that the half-life of vanadium-50 is 400 trillion years?).

Amazingly, there are some used copies of that little book on Amazon. 

You might think that in these days of smartphones and WiFi everywhere there's no need for such things. But have you never sat in a meeting or lecture and just couldn't remember how many acres in a hectare (2.47), or when the Silurian was (417 Ma BP)? Usually it's too much hassle to pull out my phone, then find Wikipedia and the one piece of data I need. Especially when tapping away on a cell phone looks like you're texting someone 'So bored, please get me out of this meeting, call me in 5 mins?'.

So, I give you the first in a series of cheatsheets. This one has mostly basic stuff on it; future editions will have more geoscience-related content. Print it out and stick in your notebook, or maybe on your wall, right next to Signs & Symbols.

If you use it, please let me know what you like or dislike, so I can improve it. Have I missed anything you're always looking up?

← Click on the image for the PDF