Jon Claerbout's office

claerbout @ stanford.edu       Short bio
The Green Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University
Asteroid Claerbout   Awards

This page is dedicated to the memory of my son (Johannes) Jos Claerbout 1974-99.

Go to my Classroom and get your free books.

Or go to the SEP project or my Launch Pad or my Publications.


Is Joe Biden responsible for the war in Ukraine?

What, When, and Where is the $100M US A.I. Censorship Industry. Start at (41:51). Shadow banned 5/2023. My link should get you to it, but on 5/5/2023 you'll hardly find it using Google. Further details

War:   Vladimir Putin said 3/18/2021, "I would like to invite President Biden to continue our discussions, but on the condition that we do it live "online". Without any delays, just as an open and direct discussion. It seems to me, this would be interesting for the Russian people, and the people of the United States, and many other countries."   President Biden never replied.   Now we have war.

I am tracking war information and opinions at my web-log Swing Voters Count (SVC).   SVC 2022.   SVC 2021.

The Censorship Industry is a topic suggested to me by a podcast of Michael Shellenberger and Mike Benz.

More historically valuable Russian Youtubes that have been blocked since the war began, Maria Butina.

The Media versus the President documented at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Tony Heller, a Weather Historian versus the Climate Modeling Industry

IQ tests and the Iraq civil war.

Learn how to get information from Substack.

Reading and Writing for You, by Jon Claerbout

Three ways Americans have been deceived

Joyful Cycling for Timid Old Folks     Trikes? Upgrading our club.   Complications

I experience Optical Migraines

Kim Iversen Shadow Banned at Youtube

Science stories told by volunteers on Youtube. (I contribute $$ to most of them via Patreon.)

My weekly discussion group Swing Voters Count, Curiosities here are addictive. Not recommended for those with intensive careers or young families.
The USA is mostly run by K Street, home of the lobbyists, mostly for three big industries, by size: 1st FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate), 2nd SECURITY (military, industrial, security= NSA,CIA,FBI), 3rd big pharma.  The big smoke screens are racism, BLM, and Donald Trump. Actually important issues are free speech and cancel culture. See also Swing Voters Count 2022 and Swing Voters Count 2021.

Computer Science for Babies is a more educational book than you might at first realize.

The wit and wisdom of Jordan Peterson, my accidental collection.

Enjoy also my wife's recent talk on Housework, Housewives, and Advertising (1:01:29).

Academics are living in a Culture of Fear to Speak.   What is this all about? It's called Cancel Culture. It affects the commercial/industrial world even more. Look it up.

I'm an enthusiast for MIT Scratch. It is a big world-wide community of people who build things to share with one another and share with the world. But to be able to share their creations, the builders must also share copies of all building parts and plans. This social regime teaches creativity among builders. It’s all based on a computer graphic language for ages 8-80+. I'm nominating MIT Scratch for the NAE Gorden Prize.

Skewed Pulses I'm claiming most seismic pulses are skewed. They are nonsymmetric in time. I offer you a publication and a brief video (8:53).     World of decon

This might be my last presentation(5:05) to SEP sponsors.

Wind shear brings a hand-thrown RC glider to 448 mph (55:59)     I explain.

Ron Unz, an American intellectual soldier of our age, a hero really, has been blacklisted by both Facebook and Google. Don't believe me? Have a look.   A long-running battle between truth and political correctness, both historical truths and human truths. Steve Hsu, another American intellectual soldier of our age attacked by the no-nothings.

Coronavirus forecasting

My grandfather died of the 1918 Spanish flu. That's a half-page story.   A 2014 National Geographic article suggests the 1918 flu may have originated in China.   Google scholar digs up technical details.

Seismic Entropy, my SEP presentation 10 Feb 2020.   It might be my last formal internal presentation.

A purpose for humanity   Jailbirds.

You can see sunset twice in one day

I have joined a small biking club. I take a photo or two each week.   Includes tips for battery-assist bikes (ebikes).

Polar warming NOT Global warming

Pre-retirement below

Actually, I terminated my Stanford payroll status in 2008.

Ground roll and normal modes, basic theory with marine data examples.

Visit to Parkfield: narrated slides (Sorry about the microphone.)

Favorite charities 2017-2021.

I purchased a fragment of a fossil mosasaur.

Multichannel decon: Vector-valued data: Separating independent causes.   The paper.   The pitch (3 min video).   The video (33 minutes).

The failure of macroeconomics: I found this convincing and plan to understand it better.

Nonstationary decon: Time variable decon without mathematics (one page)

Land data: Making Marine Data From Land Data: Suppressing 2-D surface noise on a 1-D line: Google Presentation, and an 18 minute video.  

White residuals: We want white residuals in both data space and model space, aka no frequencies should be discounted in the model fitting. I think I know how to accomplish this in any number of spatial dimensions. I'd like to find someone to work with me on data modeling while whitening nonstationary residuals. Paper and Video (12 minutes+3min appendix).

Streaming nonstationary prediction error applications. Here are my summer '15 thoughts on the topic. The early text with 2 pages of theory, 2 pages of code, and 2 pages of results. The first video (7:45) explains the idea. I review basics and skim the code in this second video (12:28). A considerable amount of algebraic simplification is found in the final paper and a video summary (15:10).

Jews and Arab refugees 4 minute youtube video . I do have some original thoughts about Gaza that I haven't seen elsewhere, so here they are.

Wavefront healing, what is it?

What's wrong with PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides?

The Khan Academy offers a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. By 2017 over one billion lessons were delivered over the internet to 100 million readers. See its philosophy from the free introduction to Sal Khan's book at Amazon. (see the Look Inside link above the cover image). I imagine myself a missionary to college professors for Khan-style flipped classes (lecture video at home, exercises in class). I recently met Sol at a lunch after a Lab School tour for donors.

Ricker-compliant and pseudo-unitary deconvolution, here is my lecture.

Want to mark up your computer screen or your slides?   I show you how (3 minute video) using free software FlySketch. Too bad it won't work if your Mac is up-to-date.

Climate --- some contrary views

Earth greening: The earth is getting greener, thanks to carbon dioxide. Where? Here's a photo produced at NASA.

Here Patrick Moore, co-founder of Green Peace and scientific ecologist predicts that all plants and humans will die in 1-2 million years for lack of an atmosphere containing CO2.

Global warming: Why are so many scientists on the global-warming bandwagon?   Science is important, but not easy to justify.   Earth scientists can link almost anything they do to climate, so they do.

Freeman Dyson wrote a thoughtful essay on climate concluding,

    "Climate models solve the equations of fluid dynamics. They might do a good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields, farms, and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."  
    Read about Freeman Dyson. He's inspirational.

A former leader of Greenpeace is now a Carbon Dioxide lover!   Since his 45 minute lecture is too long for many (especially those who don't like his conclusion) I have condensed it to two and a half pages.   Here he gives a better lecture. Here is another 15 minute talk plus Q&A.

Humanity's race between genetic meltdown and germline engineering

I invite any SEP student to join me in wrapping up a little research I have begun. Here's a short video (16:42) explaining why it should have a broad impact in seismology. The paper, Invitation to Futterman inversion gives more details.

How smart are you? How smart are others? Raven's matrices measure IQ.   I explain Raven's matrices and suggest some fun IQ searches.

What does an audience pay attention to while listening to a video lecture? 36 second video.

Books published per person Are books published a reasonable proxy for books sold or read? Do prospects for democracy depend on literacy? I gleaned this data from the web in 2015 while teaching myself spreadsheet making using Google Sheets.

Did SEP discover non-volcanic tremor?   I retell a remarkable Stanford story from 1988.

I took a commercial cruise through the Panama Canal. I know 120 photos is too many, but the skipper said the weather there is normally rainy while we had the best weather ever, so my photos all turned out excellent. They are slightly repetitive, but the topic is so unlike my daily life, and the sights so awesome, I include it all. Go full screen. Select "Slide show". Enjoy!

I purchased an electric pedal-assist bicycle. It died after four years so I purchased a different brand.

Aged 26 in 1964 I rode a Vespa motorscooter from Stockholm to Singapore. I kept a diary that my sister typed. It's an 80 page 6 month travel diary, neither scholarly nor particularly thoughtful, but You are welcome to it. Years later I came to realize that the 2-3 weeks in bed at the Bangkok YMCA I was recovering from hepatitis (likely from Calcutta). Full recovery took more like 6-12 months.

The most astonishing discovery in my life (age 29) I recount in this 14 minute video, "The positive lags of the autocorrelation of an earthquake seismogram are a reflection seismogram!"

My sparse decon paper with Antoine Guitton recently came out in GEOPHYSICS. Nonminimum phase deconvolution in the log domain: A sparse inversion approach. We threw 5 data sets at this new method and discover events on all of them with clear polarity! Check these:   Gulf of Mexico   Australia   California   Brazil and a Chevron synthetic (omitted, perfect result). Someone here should wake up and figure out this can be a money maker.

In image estimation (very large inverse problems) prior information is prescribed not only by regularizations, but by the initial solution. I show this in a real but uncomplicated setting in this video (13 minutes).

Here's what I've learned about trying to control my body weight.

Deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico are salt layers that mess up seismic waves going through them. I prepared a 10 minute lecture on how some young student might resolve that problem and make for themselves a load of money seeing all the oil under that salt.

Who is blocking congressional testimony at youtube?   It sure did look like Wall Street. But, I found out that it's not.

My first "Google PowerPoint" started with my granddaughter

Read this before you have cataract surgery.

How I fixed my leaky pool. Just in time for California's long dry summer. Hooray!

I have finally found a use for Jensen inequalities, (7 page PDF from SEP-152) and video (18 minutes)

Ground roll: suppressing it while mapping layer thickness (SEP seminar December 6, 2013). The video.   The document.   Revision for seminar 5-22-14.

I narrated the textbook I've been working on for the past two decades. It is 60 talks, average length is 11 minutes. The purpose is to "flip" the class. Students watch the video at home. In the classroom they ask questions and solve problems.

Make yourself a web site? Here's why, and how to make a screen video, all in a 3 minute video

My ideas on Capturing slide shows for redelivery: the revolution that will replace books and videos

Intelligence: what is it? Everyone has a different amount of it. It is politically incorrect to speak of a person's intelligence or their beauty or lack thereof, all of which are given to us at birth. What is intelligence? We Americans are impolite to speak of it. Chinese have no such hangup. They put big money in studying intelligence. Want to hear what they have to say? Here's one place to start.

Marine seismic debubbling and de-Rickering, a project report article later published in Geophysical Prospecting.

Upcoming SEG meeting (Nov 2012). Here is my practice talk. and Here are my slides.

My 3 minute slide-show on cats, astronauts, and angular momentum. (It is slides which are better viewed in Adobe Reader than in browser.)

I release my latest ideas on Mostly causal deconvolution clarifies marine seismogram polarity, a 23 minute video at youtube and slides. After you see this video, if it's not flying too high over your head, you might like this more advanced talk, Sparsity deconvolution in the log domain with variable gain, a 31 minute video and slides. Please send feedback to both me and antoine at sep dot stanford dot edu .

Here's a background article to my work of recent years. My professional product of the last couple years in a 4 page abstract.

Want to hear me speak? Here I am speaking to an audience of earthquake seismologists, telling them a little of exploration seismology and something that might help them out.

Would you like to double your Social Security benefits in exchange for all your medicare benefits? It's possible!

Will civilization collapse as we pass peak oil? when and how will it happen? Scan titles of these 20 knowledgable writers at The Oil Drum.

Adjustable focus eyeglasses? Here's my evaluation.

The nation's health care costs problem: Here is how to solve it in a rational manner.

We should save how much for retirement?

Interested in some help learning to memorize poems? I prepared some examples and software to enable you to adapt it to your own favorite poem. Here is my recital of The Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert Service. I've never seen another poem with as much author discipline.   My favorite songs and poems

Iceland! An amazing trip. A few fabulous slides.

A libertarian socialist engineer's proposal to solve the financial crisis: Let me know what you think.

I've been wondering if Tar Sands would save life as we know it today.

I've prepared a tutorial on the basic algebra behind oil crisis extrapolations. In Geophysics we call it the Hubbert curve. It is closely related to the logistic function, but it has two parameters, one for growth, another for decay. In practice, the two parameters are often presumed identical, but that's a doubtful assumption.

Alumni reunion/retirement party slide shows

My retirement party in Alaska, your invitation. It was great fun!

My retirement party in Alaska, the final program

On the occasion of my retirement, my speech to local staff

Apple's iPhoto, I abandon with prejudice

In the interest of optimally compartmenting the School of Earth Science, I gave out a questionairre to members of the Stanford Earth Science Faculty to identify colleagues closest to them in curriculum. Results were input to a "banquet seating" optimization program.

I've started on a history of reproducible research.

I've written a book review on a book by Mathew R. Simmons about the decline of Saudi Oil fields.

Bob Clapp and I have been examining the Miyagi earthquake.

Students and I struggled with data from a depth sounding survey of the biblical Sea of Galilee. It's gratifying to learn our result .jpg makes a genuine contribution.

Quite by accident I took some nice pictures of Sea Dragons, and another at the Monterey aquarium.

Garry Clarke came visiting with some fabulous pictures of the Donjuk Glacier. I got him started on a picture web site. Enjoy!

Graduation pictures from 6/2004.

Noontime rainbows? See my sun dog pictures.

This is a quicktime movie that I made linking astronomy to seismology. (13 min, 40Mb)

This is a quicktime movie of people having fun at the last SEP meeting. (8min, 20Mb)

I'm working on presenting pictures of Cecil Green's trips to Arabia.

I enjoyed a small journey with the Crustal Group.

I'm trying to recover a rare seismic data set.

Ever wondered about acoustic daylight imaging? Here is a quick introduction .

This picture explains (fantastic!) the relation between 1-D and 2-D filtering. To filter, you screw the filter onto the data. Convolution in 1-D does convolution in 2-D. Deconvolution in 1-D does deconvolution in 2-D. Likewise for spectral factorization, etc. Makes a great preconditioner for inversion. Rapidly solves [1+Dxx+Dyy]u=v. The entire "Helix" paper (16 pages of .ps) or html.

Calculation of the sun's acoustic impulse response by multidimensional spectral factorization .pdf. Acoustic daylight imaging via Kolmogoroff spectral factorization: Helioseismology and reservoir monitoring .pdf.

Paper submitted to '99 EAGE Helsinki meeting. Compressed and html versions. Required format on A4 paper without title and author in .ps and in .pdf. Originals appear to be lost.

Career advice recently offered to students.

My opinion on the recent Oil company mergers.

John Burg taught me Wilson's method of spectral factorization using Newton's square root iteration. html, ( 2 pages of .ps).

A lecture on interval velocity and null space. html, ( 2 pages of .ps).

For the Optical Society: Inverse problems in Reflection Seismology .html, .ps (color, 7Mb).

I recently discovered how to factor cross-spectra. html, .ps. This is a generalization of spectral factorization.

Care to join in building a large geophone array? I have lined up $50,000 to start.

After dinner speech: Seventeen years of supercomputing and other problems. How to write an introduction.

World oil futures

My experiments with mammograms html, .ps, .ps.gz.

Happy childhood: a morning on the shore of Lake Michigan.

My face (in 1997)   1,   2.   Bio.   Something valuable.   Politics.   Sore hands   Dowsing.   Family.   Twenties.   Venus and Pan.   Singapore trip.   Family newsletters: 2019, 2020, 2022.   old famvid   fam photos   music for me   nuts+fruit   MyotoniaCongenita   Gpic



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