Recently I gave each of my 5 kids a copy of a book I was delighted to read, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, by Charles Murray, fatherly advice to young people who enter the workforce. I identified with the Curmudgeon, hence the title of this column. Murray’s book started as postings on the internal website of the American Enterprise Institute where he works, with tips for entry level staff and interns such as: Excise the word “like” from your spoken English.Don’t … [Read more...]
The State of Our Industry
Industry Revenues On the walls of our Houston Z-Terra office, we have a lot of movie posters. It’s a tradition that started at 3DGeo when our office was across the road from Silicon Graphics, which made computers used for computer generated imagery and which had a lot of movie posters on its walls. We visited Silicon Graphics often for support. We kept the tradition at Z-Terra, and each poster comes from somebody’s favorite movies list. One of the posters is from Batman Begins and … [Read more...]
The future of our industry
At SEG 2017 in Houston I was asked by several students, including two students from Romania, if there is a future for our industry. Listening to media stories of renewable energy replacing fossil fuel energy in a utopian decade or so, and electric cars replacing internal combustion cars, the students were wondering whether getting a degree in geology or geophysics is a good long-term career choice. After giving several students several variations on the same answer, I decided to write an entry … [Read more...]
On Smart Migrations
I just finished reading a book by Peter Thiel, “Zero to One.” He starts the book with a question he always asks people he interviews for a job: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” It is a contrarian question that is related to the title of his book, he argues that while incremental innovations, making existing things better, is going from 1 to n, inventing new technology is going from 0 to 1. That made me think what would be my answer to his question, and one possible … [Read more...]
On Full Waveform Inversion or FWI
I believe Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been oversold by the geophysical technical community. When FWI is labeled “the Ultimate Tool”, the “Final and Ultimate Solution“, the old timers in the industry get skeptical. Art Weglein wrote in an article in The Leading Edge (TLE) in October 2013: A central purpose of this article is to bring an alternative voice, perspective, and understanding to the latest geophysical stampede, technical bubble, and self-proclaimed seismic cure-all, the so-called … [Read more...]