Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
...demistifying it to the simple then you are also an expert at the reverse.
Though it is possible tragedy happened, it is also possible that he "Simply" decided to vanish.
If Gray's boat was run over by an outgoing freighter, he would have had little time to escape. The sailboat would have been sucked under the freighter and may or may not have come to the surface after the freighter's hull and propellers got through chewing on it. This happens more often than one would think and the victims aren't just sail boats the victims range right up to fishing boats and small coastal cargo ships. The problem isn't always that these bulk carrier crews don't realize they've hit somebody. It's also that the level of incompetence among the people running some of these ships is simply frightening. About 15 years ago I watched a container ship sink that had hit a reef in a wild storm and sink with loss of most of the crew. The local rescue boat tried to get to them but all they could do was drag a couple of guys out of the sea before they were forced to retreat for fear of ending up on the reef them selves. During the sea trials it was found that they captain and the first officer were both dead drunk along with most of the crew leaving a deckhand at the wheel to steer the ship. If the man in question is experienced this is not necesarily an unusual thing to do but in costal waters it's not considered good practice. Being rather inexperienced the poor guy got confused in the bad weather and ran the ship straight onto that sunker. In the time since this happened we've had something like 8-10 foreign cargo ships stranded along the 3-400km down the coast from where I live. The coast guard, who has to risk their lives rescuing these characters, explains it by pointing out the ship's crews are often very inept at navigation and their ships badly equipped with radar and navigation aids while things like lifeboat and rescue equipment are often hopelessly neglected.
"It's never the things that happen to us that upset us, it's our view of them." -Epictetus
While I do agree, falling overboard is a likely answer, and everything you said about that is true.
There is still one question... Where is the boat?
They started the search a couple days after he went out, basically once people noticed he wasnt back.
As I remember, a week or something like that later there was concern for a storm coming in.
One would think a spotter plane would atleast find the boat, before that storm came in.
Granted after a storm, which even if not a week later, im sure at least once between now and then probably happened, I would assume the chances of finding a boat go down dramatically.
And if the boat happens to be in pieces, even if some pieces are found somewhere, id assume it could easily be no where near where he was by now, and would take a sheer stroke of luck for it to be a piece identifiable in some way.