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News from the Underground

Here’s a selection of newsworthy things over the past week.

Nice to see you. Can you help me? — New to the Slack? Here’s a friendly post that if you do in fact introduce yourself like Elvis did stating some of your interests and ambitions, the first connections may come from other people reaching out to you with their technical questions. How cool is that?

Real-time coding collaboration — Ever wondered if there are platforms where you and your chums could collaborate in real-time on your code? Check out the handful of options that came up in this post.

Rendezvous for the hackathon — The next Rendezvous is on Wednesday (not the usual Friday), 7 April at 4 pm UTC. This one is a bit different because it will be a group chat about the projects happening at the upcoming TRANSFORM hackathon. So if you have something in mind, this is your chance to pitch it. Better yet, start a discussion in Slack right now!

Kudos and logos and merchDoing a shoutout to Software Underground in some graphical format such as a presentation, video, or poster? Make sure your acknowledgements look crisp with the official logos. And while representing, colour coordinate your video calls with a coffee mug, T-shirt, or stickers from the shop.

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Shear advisoryA bit of rock physics in the #machinelearning channel as Mads asked for help predicting a shear sonic log. This is a classic seismic geophysics workflow because shear sonic is seldom acquired but allows rock physicists to get into elastic properties.

News from the Underground

Here’s what happened in the Underground this last week in February.

Rendezvous numéro trois – Matteo Ravasi’s Rendezvous was on Friday, but don’t worry, you can catch what you missed on YouTube. He showed off some of the amazing things in PyLops and in a talk entitled, Solving geophysical inverse problems on GPUs with PyLops+cupy. If you’re into signal processing, inverse problems, and data reconstruction, you need to check it out..

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Conflicts to declare – Kieran’s shared his frustration about a semi-anonymous reviewer on a manuscipt complaining that the open-source tool that was the topic of the paper was not novel, because closed-source commercial software exists that does the same thing. The discussion that follows has some interesting opinions on bias, conflict of interest, and fishing for the science in the murky waters where commercial software lurks.

Seismic unrest in Iceland – The geology hosting those gorgeous pictures of the Blue Lagoon in your Instagram feed, could soon see a once-in-a-millennium eruption, based on its current unrest and its historical record. A swarm of earthquakes are happening on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

A license to work together – What do you get when a software vendor wants to contribute to some open source software… but doesn’t like the licence? Discussion here. One quote:

Digging in over BSD-3 vs Apache 2 seems like refusing to volunteer at your local soup kitchen because they serve Hunt’s ketchup not Heinz.

News from the Underground

Here are some highlights from the Software Underground Slack this week.

Increasing dtype diversity — Progress is being made within NumPy to handle more diverse datatypes which would allow for ndarrays to carry information about units and other things. There’s been lots of other chat in the #python channel this week; check it out.

Micro-editors wanted — The collaborative book project, 52 Things You Should Know About Geocomputing has amassed the requisite number of articles and is undergoing review. And what better way to edit a collection of essays than with a collection of editors? The articles are less than 800 words and cover a very wide range of topics. So if you’re interested in helping with the review, pop into the #52things channel and say hello.

Quantitative blobology? — One question this week spurred a lot of discussion about how to do more quantitative things with amplitude maps. The thread brings up uncertainty, subjectivity, and information theory. Threads like this are always a goldmine of insight and information, check it out.

Choosing open licencesA discussion on open licences for content, code and data brought out some useful links, and led to Matt writing a blog post about choosing licences for open science.

Digital rocks — One of the great challenges of subsurface science and engineering is that we usually cannot directly measure the thing we are interested in. Interested in lithology down a borehole? You can count gamma rays. Want to know the amount of pore space? Scatter some neutrons or bounce some sonic pulses around. Check out this thread discussing synthetic forward modeling and inversion of petrophysical data, and pointing at GebPy (pictured here), an interesting new tool for petrophysics.

 
GebPy, as pictured in Maximillian Beeskow’s Twitter post.

GebPy, as pictured in Maximillian Beeskow’s Twitter post.

 

That’s it for this week, what did I miss?

News from the Underground

What’s new? Here are the highlights from the last seven days.

Strikes and dips and tadpoles — What tools would you recommend for working with structural data in boreholes? Lots to choose from, among them fractoolbox — as well as the wireline log and standard image processing libraries.

Geovisual — Speaking of interesting plots, some new visualization libraries came under the spotlight: one a d3.js library for ternary plots, and the other discussing pyrolite, a Python library for doing all sorts of geochemistry-related plots.

All the colours – Seismic interpreters have likely heard of spectral decomposition – the partitioning of seismic into three frequency bands that you can plot as RGB blended images. This work in progress uses a bag of different tools, some of which might get stitched closer together given the right motivation and use cases.

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Thermal under-where? The World Geothermal Congress has been virtualized and spread out across several weeks, and the Swung-powered Geothermal Hackathon is starting to take shape. Chime in now to influence the agenda and help shape the happenings.

NetCDF to ipygany — I wrote about ipygany a couple of weeks ago, and here Wes is showing off how to take your NetCDFs and drop them right into the notebook environment.

No mouse clicks allowed — Lastly, In a heartwarming testament to the nature of our connection to science and software, John Armitage tells a short tale about the time he met a little library called GemPy and how it helped him build an earth model entirely out of code. No mouse clicks allowed! Sadly, external forces intervened and John had to build his model all over again using proprietary point-and-click software which worked of course… until it didn’t.

Stories like this remind us why reproducible science is the best science. If you have tales of open science glory — or woe! — consider sharing them in the Software Underground.

News from the Underground

News from the Underground

Before jumping into the highlights from the Slack channels, just a reminder that the schedule is lining up for TRANSFORM 2021 conference in April. Go to the event page and register now!

Colour by numbers — There is a bit of art and a bit of science involved in making data visualizations — but it’s mostly science. For instance, this thread is an absolute showcase of pure helpfulness and enthusiasm about colouring a 2D array of numbers. Not always as easy as it sounds…

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Scraping open the earthA post about Pangaea, a data publishing service dealing with a variety of datasets in the earth and atmospheric sciences. Oh, and wanna loop through thousands of geospatial datasets in the inventory, Wesley’s got you covered.

Coordinate system correctness — Need to fix an erroneous coordinate reference system (CRS) in a shapefile? GeoPandas has got what you need.

Confused about type hints in Python? You’re not alone. There was a massive conversation about it this week on Swung. Conclusion: Yes.

Open all the wells — How many signatures will it take to open an entire country’s well data? No idea, but we might get to find out. A post was shared about a petition to the Dutch government to open all the well logs in the Netherlands. The petition, originating with one of the dGB founders, is still open.

Five star open data — Still on open data, is the post pointing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Five Star Open Data plan. Some other frameworks, models, and concepts were discussed in this thread. What should Swung be doing to adopt, modify, or accelerate these initiatives?

What caught your eye on Software Underground this week? Let us know in the comments.