Garage geoscience

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The Geophysics Hackathon 2013 is over. It was awesome. You should have been there.

The backers

I didn't make a big effort to find sponsors, because I didn't need to — just like the participants, they self-select. dGB Earth Sciences, Enthought, and OpenGeoSolutions are the leaders in the business of open geophysical software. Their support and encouragement means a lot to me personally, and is having a huge impact on our community. Please support them when you have the chance. We need companies like these.

The hackers

There was not too much of a plan. We were keen to allow organic collaboration to happen. So the hackers arrived on Saturday morning, and spent an hour or two matching projects to interests and skills. They settled down to work at about 10:30, and the creative buzz in the room was palpable.

The projects that emerged were:

  • Data viewers for amorphous well data masses, addressing uncertainty due to data disorganization
  • A seismic signal processing sandbox in the web browser, addressing resolution uncertainty
  • Mobile and desktop apps for on-the-fly time–depth transformation, with error bars

On Sunday we ended up in START Houston's garage space, with the doors open to the beautiful fall morning. It had the ambience of a picnic. A sunny Sunday morning with cinnamon coffee, breakfast tacos, Python, and geophysics — what more could you ask for?

The geeks among you might be interested to know what sort of hardware the hacking geophysicists were developing their ideas on. Turns out it was perfectly evenly distributed: 4 each of Mac, Windows, and Linux. Of the Linux distros, there was 1 each of Centos, Ubuntu, crunchbang, and OpenSuse.

At the request of Chris Chalcraft, I also did an impromptu poll of code editor software. This was similarly diverse:

The other backers

Chris Krohn has been a true champion of the event. On Saturday, she brought new SEG president-elect Chris Liner to visit the event — his natural curiosity and enthusiasm are infectious, and lifted everyone present. I hope he's able to realize some of his vision during his presidency. (You do read his blog, right?)

Today she returned with Dennis Cooke and Peter Annan. They all graciously acted as judges. The other judges were Paul de Groot and Eric Jones, two of our generous sponsors, and Maitri Erwin, one of Agile's closest friends. Though they couldn't stick around, we also had visits from Zane Jobe and Joe Dellinger — much appreciated votes of support.

We'll be blogging about the SEG Annual Meeting all week... when the dust has settled a bit, we'll tell you more about the projects the hackers built. It's amazing what you can do in 2 days.

Places for ideas in Houston

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Evan has told before of how productive he is at the HUB Halifax. And ever since I've been involved in The HUB South Shore, a co-working space in my small town, I've been keenly interested in communal and collaborative workspaces. I think they're a powerful model for independent scientists and entrepreneurs, perhaps even inside large companies too. 

Because of this, and because most hotels are such boring venues (there are always exceptions), we decided to host the hackathon this weekend at a co-working space, START Houston (right). A converted urban loft residence (well, a loft on the ground floor), it's got downtown character with an artistic edge. Evan and I gatecrashed a startup pitch coaching session while we were there — we heard 3-minute pitches from 4 Houston startups, including eOilBoom, an interesting crowdfunding platform for oil and gas concerns, and Philantro, a curated social layer for non-profits and philanthropists.

We need this level of ideation, business-model testing, and experimental entrepreneurship in subsurface science. How do we make this happen?

Co-working? Co-reseach!

Two weeks ago, I tweeted something about the hackathon, and Jacob at Brightwork Co-Research tweeted back at me:

Just another one of the wonderful serendipities of social media. That one connection is worth a lot to me, and is characteristic of the generous community of scientists on Twitter.

While in town, we thought we'd drop in and see what Brightwork is about... and I've rarely been more excited. Jacob Shiach (left) showed us the embryonic space neighbouring Rice University, complete with a rapid prototyping space (think of hardware hacking soldering, 3D printers, and so on), and a wet lab for full-on biotechnical research. In under a year, Jacob plans to fill the space with researchers in bio, physics, math, technology, and any other scientific discipline that needs a lab outside of academia or industry. What can independent researchers do when they have all the tools of big research? What would you do with your own lab?

These places exist

To complete our tour, we headed over to Platform — a more conventional co-working space around the corner from Brightwork. The familiar buzz and productive vibe of co-working hits you immediately: here a livestream of TEDxHouston City2.0, there a new startup hashing out customer segments for their product. Imagine an office full of smart, energetic, friendly people who don't actually have to work together, no meetings, and no sign above the sink saying "Your mother doesn't work here!". Yeah, those places exist.

Geoscience, reservoir engineering, and code

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We’re in the middle of a second creative revolution driven by technology. “Code” is being added to the core creative team of art and copy, and the work being made isn't like the ads we're used to. Code is enabling the re-imagination of everything. Aman Govil, Art, Copy & Code

Last year at Strata I heard how The Guardian newspaper has put a team of coders — developers and visualization geeks — at the centre of their newsroom. This has transformed their ability to put beautiful and interactive graphics at the heart of the news, which in turn transforms their readers' ability to absorb and explore the stories.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, I remember when all subsurface teams had a dedicated and über-powerful tech, sometimes two. They could load data, make maps, hack awk scripts, and help document projects. Then they started disappearing, and my impression is that today most scientists have to do the fiddly stuff themselves. Woefully inefficiently. 

The parable of the coder

Give someone 20 sudoku to solve. They'll sit down and take a day to solve them. At the end, they'll hate their job, and possibly you, but at least you'll have your solutions.

Now, give a coder 20 sudoku to solve. They'll sit down and take a week to solve them — much slower. The difference is that they'll have solved every possible sudoku. What's more, they'll be happy. And you can give them 10,000 more on Monday.

Hire a coder

The fastest way out of the creeping inefficiency is to hire as many coders as you can. I fervently believe that every team should have a coder. Not to build software, not exactly. But to help build quick, thin solutions to everyday problems — in a smart way. Developers are special people. They are good at solving problems in flexible, reusable, scalable ways. Not with spreadsheets and shared drives, but with databases and APIs. If nothing else, having more coders around the place might catalyse the shabby pace of innovation and entrepreneurship in subsurface geoscience and engineering.

Do your team a favour — make the next person you hire a developer.

Image: Licensed CC-BY by Héctor Rodríguez, Wikimedia Commons.

The deliberate search for innovation & excellence

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Collaboration, knowledge sharing, and creativity — the soft skills — aren't important as ends in themselves. They're really about getting better at two things: excellence (your craft today) and innovation (your craft tomorrow). Soft skills matter not because they are means to those important ends, but because they are the only means to those ends. So it's worth getting better at them. Much better.

One small experiment

The Unsession three weeks ago was one small but deliberate experiment in our technical community's search for excellence and innovation. The idea was to get people out of one comfort zone — sitting in the dark sipping coffee and listening to a talk — and into another — animated discussion with a roomful of other subsurface enthusiasts. It worked: there was palpable energy in the room. People were talking and scribbling and arguing about geoscience. It was awesome. You should have been there. If you weren't, you can get a 3-minute hint of what you missed from the feature film...

Go on, share the movie — we want people to see what a great time we had! 

Big thank you to the award-winning Craig Hall Video & Photography (no relation :) of Canmore, Alberta, for putting this video together so professionally. Time lapse, smooth pans, talking heads, it has everything. We really loved working with them. Follow them on Twitter. 

News headlines

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Our old friend the News post... We fell off the wagon there for a bit. From now on we'll just post news when we collect a few stories, or as it happens. If you miss the old last-Friday-of-the-month missive, we are open to being convinced!

First release of Canopy

Back in November we mentioned Canopy, Austin-based Enthought's new Python programming environment, especially aimed at scientists. Think of it as Python (an easy-to-use language) in MATLAB form (with file management, plotting, etc.). Soon, Enthought plan to add a geophysical toolbox — SEGY read/write, trace display, and so on. We're very, very excited for the future of rapid geophysical problem-solving! More on the Enthought blog.

The $99 supercomputer

I recently got a Raspberry Pi — a $35 Linux machine a shade larger than a credit card. We're planning to use it at The HUB South Shore to help kids learn to code. These little machines are part of what we think could be an R&D revolution, as it gets cheaper and cheaper to experiment. Check out the University of Southampton's Raspberry Pi cluster!

If that's not awesome enough for you, how about Parallella, which ships this summer and packs 64 cores for under $100! If you're a software developer, you need to think about whether your tools are ready for parallel processing — not just on the desktop, but everywhere. What becomes possible?

Geophysics + 3D printing = awesome

Unless you have been living on a seismic boat for the last 3 years, you can't have failed to notice 3D printing. I get very excited when I think about the possibilities — making real 3D geomodels, printing replacement parts in the field, manifesting wavefields, geobodies, and so on. The best actual application we've heard of so far — these awesome little physical models in the Allied Geophysical Laboratories at the University of Houston (scroll down a bit).

Sugru

Nothing to do with geophysics, but continuing the hacker tech and maker theme... check out sugru.com — amazing stuff. Simple, cheap, practical. I am envisaging a maker lab for geophysics — who wants in?

Is Oasis the new Ocean?

Advanced Seismic is a Houston-based geophysical software startup that graduated from the Surge incubator in 2012. So far, they have attracted a large amount of venture capital, and I understand they're after tens of millions more. They make exciting noises about Oasis, a new class of web-aware, social-savvy software with freemium pricing. But so far there's not a lot to see — almost everything on their site says 'coming soon' and Evan and I have had no luck running the (Windows-only) demo tool. Watch this space.

Slow pitch

The world's longest-running lab experiment is a dripping flask of pitch, originally set up in 1927. The hydrocarbon has a viscosity of about 8 billion centipoise, which is 1000 times more viscous than Alberta bitumen. So far 8 drops have fallen, the last on 28 November 2000. The next? Looks like any day now! Or next year. 

Image: University of Queensland, licensed CC-BY-SA.