As you may know, I like going to conferences outside the usual subsurface circuit. For this year's amusement, I spent part of last week at the annual Wikimania conference, which this year was in London, UK. I've been to Wikimania before, but this year the conference promised to be bigger and/or better than ever. And I was looking for an excuse to visit...

After reading Chris Liner's recent writings on attenuation and negative Q — both in The Leading Edge and on his blog — I've been reading up a bit on anisotropy. The idea was to stumble a little closer to writing the long-awaited Q is for Q post in our A to Z series. As usual, I got distracted... In his 1994 paper AVO in tranversely isotropic media—An...

It's linkfest time again. All the links, in one handy post. First up — I've seen some remarkable scientific visualizations recently. For example, giant ocean vortices spiralling across the globe (shame about the rainbow colourbar though). Or the trillion-particle Dark Sky Simulation images we saw at SciPy. Or this wonderful (real, not simulated) video...

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (2nd ed., Graphics Press, 2001) celebrates communication through data graphics. The book provides a vocabulary and practical theory for data graphics, and Tufte pulls no punches — he suggests why some graphics are better than others, and even condemns failed ones as lost opportunities. The...

Leafing through our pile of new books on seismic analysis got me thinking about technical books and the future of technical publishing. In particular: Why are these books so expensive?  When will we start to see reproducibility? Does all this stuff just belong on the web? Why so expensive? Should technical books really cost several times what ordinary...

Last year, I did a round-up of six books about seismic interpretation. A raft of new geophysics books recently, mostly from Cambridge, prompts this look at six volumes on seismic analysis — the more quantitative side of interpretation. We seem to be a bit hopeless at full-blown book reviews, and I certainly haven't read all of these books from cover...