Category: Uncategorized

Busy with a Side of Traffic

When I was still in grad school (was that over a year ago?) the common theme was that everyone was too busy to do anything except what they were doing (or what they decided they wanted to do).  “Busyness” is of course the way Academia likes to define its worth, and that trickles down fairly rapidly to the proletariat.  Advisors are so busy they have no time to meet with grad students; grad students are so busy they have no time to meet with undergrads they are teaching…and everyone talks about it all the time.  I’ve seen this since I’ve started my current job, but only tangentially, and I blame circumstances more than culture (maybe more on this later).  In many places, chronic busyness is a badge of honor, because if you aren’t scrambling, you aren’t trying to do all the things.

This brings me to bicycle commuting, of course.  I ride to work every day, year round, and have done so for at least five years now.  It’s not a long commute.  For the record, I had a vehicle during grad school, and now we have a family vehicle, but I don’t use it to commute.  What I’ve noticed about commuting (and speaking with other commuters) is a similar badge of honor: how much your ride here sucked.  This can be expressed in number of drivers (“there was so much traffic”), as quality (“man, I saw so many bad drivers today”), or as machine bringers of death (“I almost died so many times last year”).  

The problem with all that is the difference between talking to fellow commuters about this (“I feel your pain”) and talking to the rest of your social circle (or strangers).  It’s a mixed message, especially when speaking with people who don’t commute by bicycle.  On one hand, you’re trying to convince them (aren’t we all?) by telling them how wonderful it is (the exercise! the sights and sounds!  the freedom!  the savings!)…and on the other hand you’re complaining about how much it sucks.  That’s right–all that “poor me, I almost died” is turning people off to commuting!  Isn’t that crazy?  If you were listening to this, which side would you believe?

New Preprint: Comparing size of morphospace occupation among extant and cretaceous fossil freshwater mussels using Elliptical Fourier Analysis

A new preprint of some of the work from my Master’s thesis is now available at PeerJ, authored by myself and my MS and PhD advisor, Joseph Hartman.  We’re looking for honest, science-y feedback in order to improve the paper before publication, so please check it out!

Burton-Kelly M, Hartman JH. (2014) Comparing size of morphospace occupation among extant and cretaceous fossil freshwater mussels using Elliptical Fourier Analysis. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e626v1 http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.626v1

Selecting Wells without a Zone in Techlog

Open the Zones Inventory (under Quick Data Mining).  You’ll get a list of zone names.  Find the one of interest.  The two columns “Wells where present” and “Wells where absent” are magic–if you right-click, you can filter (“Project filter”) to show (in the Project Browser) only the wells listed in those cells.

An additional tip is that the Zones Inventory is dynamic with the Project Browser, so if you filter in the Project Browser to only show one group of wells, then click the Refresh button the Zones Inventory window, you’ll get results only from that group.

Productive Echo Chambers

Do they exist?

Thinking about the idea of repping/upvoting comments (Streetsblog, for example).  If someone gets enough upvotes on an insightful comment from the “echo chamber” community, is this a) positive reinforcement and b) likely to get them to move outside the echo chamber and engage other people to cause change?  Or will this person become habituated to the praise he or she receives in the echo chamber, to the point where criticism from outside is either ignored or taken very personally?

See also: Participation awards.

Petrel exporting/importing in Rescue format

Usually done to open a grid in Petrel 2011 so you can export to CMG without errors.
 
Before exporting, make sure your porosity and permeability values are all non-zero.  Use the calculator to replace zeros with a very small value such as 0.0001.
 
Petrel 2014:

Right-click grid in model pane, export, rescue.

 
Petrel 2011:
New project
Model pane, right-click, import
Select rescue format
Right-click model, export

 

uMap is the best web-GIS alternative to Google Maps

Really.  You should try it.  http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en

Pros:

  • Can split lines (Google Maps can’t).
  • Can move features to different layers (Google Maps can’t).
  • Can have advanced attributes, line styles.
  • Can see distances plotted with features.
  • Can turn layers on and off.
  • Can import data ()GPX, KML).
  • Can limit who can see and who can edit.
  • Uses OpenStreetMap, so if you know your GPS is right and the basemap is wrong, you can change the basemap.

Cons:

  • No satellite imagery basemap.
  • Can’t switch layer display order (but can duplicate layers, might be possible to change order that way).

I haven’t played with everything, but I’ve built a map for a race I’m directing and I’m sharing this with the participants.

Top Perks from “Outside Best Places to Work 2014”

This is a work in progress and will be updated.

Jobs in my particular discipline (i.e., not outdoor equipment manufacture or even outdoor-oriented) don’t generally come with the same kinds of perks that some of these companies have.  I’m curious why that is, and I wonder if, by incorporating some of these into my current office environment, my employer could attract more talent…

In no particular order, here are the workplace characters that I would enjoy and would work in my particular situation:

  1. Showers.  I’m a bicycle commuter, but heading out on a road ride from the office and being able to clean up afterward would make me a happy puppy.  Seen at: Strava, pretty much everyone else.
  2. Alternative transportation perks.  Credit for not clogging up the streets with more cars and the air with more pollution, in the form of time off or other currency.  Seen at: Mindbody, Patagonia, Deckers Brands.
  3. Gym on site.  I like being active, and what better way to keep employees healthy than to give them a place to work out?  Seen at: Sportif.
  4. Dogs at work.  I didn’t grow up with dogs, but now that I have one, it would be nice to bring him to work once in a while.  Seen at: Backbone Media, Ibex, Hydroflask, Smith Optics.
  5. Kids at work.  As in, onsite daycare for when you’re really busy and cool enough coworkers to be okay with kids running around when you aren’t.
  6. Flexible hours.  Modification: Unlimited personal time.  Seen at: Pretty much everyone on the list.  FullContact apparently gives you a vacation stipend of some sort.
  7. Social consciousness.  The belief that we should be helping people who aren’t normally within our sphere of influence.  Seen at: Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s.
  8. Environmental consciousness.  The belief that what we do should be good for the planet.  In the oil and gas sphere, this is a rough one to find, but I am confident that with extraction efficiency improvements to the n+1 degree, coupled with greater investment in alternative energy engineering solutions and conservation, we can do our part to improve the world.  It’s just so incremental sometimes. /soapbox.  Seen at: Patagonia, Namaste Solar.
  9. Indoor bicycle storage.  Security, convenience, and reduce wear-and-tear.
  10. Stock ownership, profit sharing, or co-op agreement.  Seen at: Deschutes Brewery, StoneAge.
  11. Informal office space.  Set things up the way you like, work from where you like, spread out, play games (do pullups), whatever.  Seen at: Hydroflask.
  12. Bar, or at least not a “dry” workplace.  I’m not advocating drunkenness on the job, but sometimes a drink at the end of the day can fuel interesting geological discussions.  Seen at: Omelet.
  13. Active employees.  Seen at : Infinite Energy (notable because this is a “traditional” company), a lot of others. 
  14. Snacks.  Who doesn’t like snacks, or fizzy drinks, or coffee?  Seen at: Pacific Market International.

Cumulative Charts in Drupal with Views and Charts

If you’re trying to use the Charts module to create cumulative graphs over time (in my case, race registrations).  No time now for a detailed post.

This guy had the answer: http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/50066/how-to-add-up-rows-in-a-view

He cites this but I didn’t use it: https://www.drupal.org/node/1516348

This is the module you need, can only add field if you are User 1: https://www.drupal.org/project/views_php

My setup (I was pulling the order_id field and aggregating the results as a count):
drupal_cumulative.png
drupal_cumulative1.png

Output:
drupal_cumulative2.png