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.'"

Comments

If you are an expert at taking mystery and...

[3seas]

...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.

Wisdom of Crowds (of geeks)

[(Robo_Bro)]

FTFA:

I decided I'd organize a group that would predict where an object would drift in that period If anyone's read James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds", they'd be familiar with a story in which a lost ship was located by tabulating/averaging the guesses from individuals (most with no search and rescue experience). This technique is roughly based on the idea of nature's bell-curve; collect enough guesses and the mean will be RIGHT ON. Anyways, I was simply curious if this technique was employed. How poetic would it be for Jim to be found because of a database's average?

Re:Simplest explanation - he fell overboard

[dissy]

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.