About Rock Paper Whiskers

This blog exists because the best way to understand data analysis is to do it with data that matters. The projects here use real scientific datasets — seismic waveforms, geophysical measurements, historical observations — and work through them the way a researcher would: with questions, dead ends, and results you can check against published literature.

About me

I’m Philip. Professionally I’ve held a variety of roles to include data scientist, geologist, and professor. Academically I’ve earned degrees spanning the disciplines of Biology, Computer Science, Geology, Mathematics, Psychology, and Science Education. I started this blog because I think that it is rewarding to show people how to figure things out.

What you’ll find here

Each project is organized around a real analytical problem. Most involve:

• Acquiring data from public scientific repositories (IRIS, USGS, NOAA, etc.)

• Building a local database or working data structure

• Reproducing a published analysis with annotated Python code

• Interpreting and visualizing the results

If you’re comfortable with Python and curious about applying it to real scientific questions, this blog is for you.