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Inside The Search For Jim Gray
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek adds some interesting new details to the story of unprecedented grass-roots search for Jim Gray, the Turing Award-winning database guru who helped set up Microsoft Research's San Francisco lab. Gray disappeared Jan. 26 after sailing out of San Francisco Bay to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, 27 miles offshore. Once the Coast Guard had given up its massive search, Gray's friends rallied the tech community — including people like Google co-founder Sergey Brin — into action. 12,000 volunteers spent 3 days examining 1.6 million hi-res images of ocean gathered by a NASA pilot who flew a U2 low over the area where Gray was thought to have disappeared. But it was all for naught. As Sendmail creator Eric Allman notes, Gray was expert at 'stripping away mystery by making things simple. It's an irony to me that he should end in a mystery.'"
Despise his work for Microsoft that guy developed brilliant systems. Microsoft's way is evil shit and all that stuff... but in the end I think that we're all geeks and/or scientists and we should forget this software wars sometimes and work together for a common good and Gray's work with scientific databases is a common good.
I would not work with him developing a Microsoft product for example, but I would be honoured by joining him in some scientific research;
Well, I don't usually post because of my poor english... but sometimes I must reply. Sorry for the bad english.
Wow, you are a fucking psychopath. Congratulations.
If he was in any way an experience Yacht master then there is no way that would happen. The only way you're ever going to get that type of collision is if the skipper in charge of the yacht is seriously inexperienced or there is zero visibility. Given that he was heading out to scatter his mother's ashes I doubt it was bad vis, that's the sort of trip you want to do in perfect conditions as you want it be a memorable experience.
First rule of the sea, it is your responsibility to avoid a collision, regardless if the other vessel should give way to you.
You are so wrong!
I nearly got nailed by a tanker leaving Charlestown harbor at about 2:00 am.
The tanker came out of Charlestown roads and immediately altered course straight in my direction.
I had no engine and was totally reliant on sail, so my ability to get out of his way was restricted. I used flashlamps focussed on the bridge of the tanker, but nothing changed.
In the end I had to use a distress flare, and the tanker missed me by about 20 feet.
What many people don't realize is that modern ships are comouter driven, thereby only requiring one person on watch when under voyage. That person could have been taking a leak, studying a chart, whatever.
When a tanker bears down on you at 15 knots, you don't have much time to react, and if you panic, what you DO do could be considered as counter productive, to say the least!
Remember the search for the Kim family, lost on a snowy mountain pass in Oregon?
At the time, people wrote about potential ways to make searching distributed: "traditional aerial photography is far better, because it's higher resolution, higher contrast, can be done under clouds, can be done at other than a directly overhead angle, is generally cheaper and on top of all this can possibly be done from existing searchplanes." And if the lost person has a cell phone, then the plane can also have "a small mini-cell base station (for all cell technologies) that could be mounted in a regular airplane and flown over the area." Traditional aerial searches are limited to only a couple of pairs of eyes, but continuous hi-res photos can lead to thousands of viewers. Of course, there was the question of what to do with gigabytes of photos- how to automate distribution.
The Jim Gray search team found a way to distribute aerial photo searches. Using Mechanical Turk was a good idea, because the infrastructure was already there.
Now, for the next lost family, or lost child, it'll be much faster to get photos up and examined.
They're helping physical search enter the 21st century, not because he or his friends were money rich, but because his and his colleagues were data rich. i.e. if you look up petabyte science, Jim Gray's name shows up a bunch. If there was any quid pro quo it wasn't because the searchers were giving agencies money, it was because they gave new methods.