The videos and attendee stories from the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists make me wonder if I want to attend an American SEG convention ever again other than for the Women’s Network meeting and socializing. Check out Matt Hall’s and Evan Bianco’s writeup of the Solving Hard Problems In Geoscience unsession they held, especially this video. My Perfect Well Tie makes a cameo on a rather dapper-looking Matt.

SO. JEALOUS. Video, sharing, young and enthusiastic participants and not just cool new hipster stuff but more hard geoscience than you can bear (many geophysics innovations in recent decades have come from Canada). Forget another meeting where people show the same, staid, black-and-white powerpoint (same as the last five years with one new slide every year) to a dark room full of the half-asleep and video is not allowed to “protect intellectual property and the exclusivity of the participants.” What utter disregard for the audience, fellow members and the promotion of science beyond the room. Anyway, have you ever noticed that real science and information exchange happen in the hallways and bars in those types of conferences? Imagine if you can transfer that effect to a larger group all in the same room.

Offices, meetings, 20th century computing and attendant inefficiencies have started to wear on me as I get older. This is because I am one of those people who believes that the future means becoming a better, smarter and more wise version of yourself and all those you have worked with, and not just turning into an old hand. Efficiency motivates me because I want to do more things with my time and not less, and hour-long, sit-down meetings work to the opposite end. Incidentally, a meeting of four and only four highly-skilled scientists (and no managers) with a time constraint of three hours is best for rapid problem-solving, assigning priority and responsibility, and getting stuff done. Beyond four is an opportunity for “another set of eyes” to say something just for the sake of saying it. And that creates UNNECESSARY TASKS in place of NECESSARY ACTION. Hey, I’m all for science projects, but to what end?

Speaking of conferences, I owe you guys a Galacticon III and Comicpalooza 2013 rundown of events. For now: D and I made great new friends (still pleasantly buzzing about it on social media channels), Michael Hogan, Edward James Olmos and Herbert Jefferson, Jr. are lots of fun to talk with, Mary McDonnell is brilliant, beautiful and gracious and Michael Trucco gave me a hug. I’ll never wash that shirt again. Thanks, Athenae, for the heads up. Your signed Olmos glossy is in the mail.

Frontier deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is becoming more difficult as we enter deeper water, much deeper reservoirs and potential under salt. As a result, we are faced with prospects that are supported by little to no amplitude, tiny seismic bandwidth as well as flat amplitude variation with offset (AVO) that sit in high pressure and high temperature environments. Every industry class, talk, symposium and workshop I have attended in the past year present software, workflows and case studies that address happy direct hydrocarbon indicators (Class IIp and III AVO) and merry time-lapse amplitude analysis (4D) in the Gulf of Mexico shelf or the North Sea, West Africa and Northern Australia deepwater where these anomalies are abundant and detectable.

Yesterday, I asked an industry expert on 4D about its application in hard sands, deep sands with flat or Class IV AVO, reservoirs with low to no acoustic impedance contrast and subsalt and FINALLY we started to talk as a group about time shifts and seismic data of low peak frequency. This is where seismic acquisition and processing technology is headed with finer acquisition and processing grid spacing, spectral decomposition and (somewhat) full waveform inversion, but not at the interpretation workflow level because these now address the planning of offset gas wells on land (Poisson’s ratio cubes, Class III, Poisson’s ratio cubes, elastic impedance, ZZZzzzzz).

Some day soon, when the romance with quick-and-easy onshore gas is over, we will re-enter the ultra-deepwater in earnest to pick apart the tiniest of changes in frequency, acoustic impedance and [insert new property here]. Three questions: 1) Who is already doing this and well? 2) Is it worth it, given the cheap cost of computing (plus) and ultimate project economics (minus)? and 3) Are we ready?

This Mother’s Day weekend, we attended our first Art Car Parade since moving to Houston. It is a once-a-year welcome addition of color, music and a carnival-like atmosphere to the otherwise sterile streets of this city. Tame as the parade was parade watchers’ reaction to a pretty funky spectacle was compared with the level of participation we’re used to in New Orleans, we didn’t get shot at. And there in a nutshell is the result of moving away from the Big Easy: you miss the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. One may argue this is a way to survive, but not to live.

Fellow New Orleans blogger Deborah Cotton was one of the 19 victims of yesterday’s second-line shooting. Thankfully, Deb made it through surgery and is in stable condition, but it’s so messed up that she just lived what she knows intimately and raises awareness about: the beauty of the second line culture and the gun violence that occurs during these cultural events, not because of them. Here is a video of Deb talking about how cultural functions held outside are not a cause but an opportunity for young black New Orleanians to settle scores and what the real problem is:

We’ve discussed how pathetic it is that the only reason this particular New Orleans shooting made national headlines is it occurred on Mother’s Day and lent itself easily to headlines. Convenient to call something the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Christmas Killings, the Boston Marathon Bombings or the Mother’s Day shootings. What if this shooting had happened next weekend? It pains me each time I hear of violence anywhere, but to be completely honest, this particular incident depresses me more because my friends were there and one lies in a hospital bed having dodged an actual bullet and because, as Brentin Mock asks, what kind of animal does this?

… Maybe, the kids of New Orleans are who the media say they are, these resilient super humans who“ve encountered so much death ” from Katrina to the murder capital stats to all the bodies caught in Lil“ Wayne songs ” that getting shot or shot at is nothing to them. So dey in good condition. It’s nothing.

I don’t believe that. All I know is that it must take an animal to open fire on a gathering of men, women and children singing and dancing in the streets, celebrating mothers. Who does dat? What does dat?

… I’m already enraged. My rage grows every time I see a picture of those shot laying near pools of blood circulated on Twitter or Facebook or Vine. The images no longer report violence; they merely illustrate and animate it. They damn near auto-tune it, and “followers” automatically tune into it.

What are the City of New Orleans and the New Orleans Police Department doing to protect my friends who are part of the parade and second line from being shot instead of charging exorbitant permit prices of the social aid and pleasure clubs? What are these cultural organizations paying for? To protect the public from themselves?

Going back to the reason for the shootings: No one in the entire course of their upbringing cared or cares about these shooters. The shooters don’t care about anyone else, as is obvious by yesterday’s events, and are creating another generation of young people like them. The spiral continues downwards. Where to break it and how?

Meanwhile, the Governor of Louisiana has completely gutted mental health funding and endorses the teaching of creationism in taxpayer-funded schools, all while chiding those who want to put even the slightest brake on the crazy availability of guns, especially illegal ones, in this country. But we’re good at prayer vigils and task forces, so there’s that.

And before you idiotically write it off as a New Orleans or Louisiana thing, there are armed robberies occurring in homes and driveways all over “nice neighborhoods” in Houston for the same reasons. And the police department here reacts to these events just like its New Orleans counterpart: It reacts.

Disappointment and rage rule right now, but I know this: The way things are will not fix the wrong. This combination of police, government, media and underlying social problems that I mentioned above only serve our current social tenets of bureaucracy, sensationalism and desensitization and they will only make things worse. Change will require giving a damn and a rebuild of values, priorities and those in charge. Are you ready for that? I thought not.

For right now, please join me in wishing Deb a speedy and relatively painless recovery. In lieu of flowers, please check The Gambit for details on a planned fundraiser.

One of the tools in the geophysical workflow is the well-to-seismic tie. This is a calibration step involving the generation of a “synthetic seismic” from well data and comparing it to actual seismic data collected over the area. It ensures robustness or goodness of fit, i.e. that interfaces and intervals interpreted on the seismic data set match those same markers and units in the well penetration with a high level of accuracy. Think about it this way: If your seismic data don’t match what you see in the earth, what’s the point of working with them to draw conclusions about top, base, thickness and extent of the oil/gas reservoir?

So, I made a well-to-seismic tie. A Seismic Tie. Get it, get it? The reservoir section towards the base of the tie is based on Figure 11 from Roy White’s and Rob Simm’s seminal 2003 paper Good practice in well ties.

It took one black tie, one silver Sharpie, three different gauges of gold Sharpies and markers, and five hours of freehand drawing (including an hour spent pondering some geophysical concepts that came up as I drew the seismic traces surrounding the synthetic).

Everyone I’ve shown the tie to so far thinks I should get a booth at the SEG conference and make these to order. How about Geophysical Sartorialist as a title on my new business cards?