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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.'"
...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.
"Jim's dead, Jim."
I'd have thought a U2 would be more useful at high altitude taking super high resolution shots of wide areas than at low level where something like a private turboprop and an 'average' DSLR would be just as useful.
FTR: My captcha was 'sailed'.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm still trying to get my head round relational database concepts - if he disappeared while scattering his mother's ashes, would this be an example of a one-tomb-many-relation?
This guy, despite brilliant mental gifts, went to work for a convicted monopolist. Why should we care that he's probably now dead? There are plenty of innocent people who deserve more sympathy than this sellout who willingly joined forces with a criminal organisation.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I guess now it is a good time to switch to Oracle.
At least Larry knows his way around his yacht.
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.
Kidnapped for any kind of an agency?
That's my theory, and don't mod me down, it's really what I think.
The Pacific Ocean off California is cold. You don't have long in that water before hypothermia sets in. And remember that couple that fell off a cruise ship a few weeks ago? Well, the crew knew they fell overboard, and it still took hours and hours to find them.
Most people have no clue about how damn big the ocean is and how hard it is to spot a person in the swells. When you have thousands and thousands of square miles to search, getting within 1/2 mile of the target is close. And how likely are you to spot someone's head half a mile away when the swells are 5-6 feet high or higher?
So yeah, "vanish" he did - into the Pacific.
Don't fuck with the ocean lest it remind you of your relative size.
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.
SELECT [Location] FROM [MissingPeople] WHERE [FirstName] = 'Jim' AND [LastName] = 'Gray'
Results: NULL
Oh my.
"It's never the things that happen to us that upset us, it's our view of them." -Epictetus
...he went near the new CERN's accelerator, did he?
borderline psychopathic.
They should determine other vessels that could possibly have been nearby during the window of time of Gray's disappearance. Chase down the details of those vessels' journey, especially any that changed course unexpectedly. That search may lead them to Gray.
... not a SINGLE one of those people would have lifted a finger to help him out. The rich help the rich. That's just the way it is.
The 'Others' have him.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is a better explanation. And I remember now that I first heard this parable mentioned in one of Richard Feynman's books; the chapter can be found here.
You sail out by yourself in a small vessel near the Farralones and don't return, there's not much mystery. There's many a boat out sitting on the ocean floor out there that was piloted by an experienced sailor. Some nasty, shark infested waters out there.
And just what is "low" for a U2?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
startling turn These early contaminated while HAppiness Another
To find a *body*.
Its nice to know there are no missing children these days.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The guy will be missed at Microsoft, that's for sure... I hope all that brand new kernel transaction stuff already works perfectly in Vista.
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Jim Gray - A talk with THE SQL Guru and Architect
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=498
Jim Gray - Part II of talking about Database Design
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=504
Conversation with scientist, engineer and database legend Jim Gray
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=168
You can see it now, a story of intense technical concentration and tragedy. He was preoccupied by an intriguing database problem while his laptop running Vista was crashing.. ..and was never seen or heard from again.
Mauled by a huge tanker? Chomped on by great white sharks? Or sunk from hitting some sharp rocks at the bottom.. Dr. Who where are you?
Time for some hound dolphins.
-- Robi
I participated in this search and spend approx 10 hours looking at the pictures. It was strangely satisfying to do, like a meaningful scavenger hunt. I later discovered Stardust@home using the same Amazon Mechanical turk technology. You are helping the scientists find star dust particles in a aerogel. It takes 15min to qualify via a test but is it quite fun and as I said earlier strangely rewarding.
Help fight continental drift.
Put that in your transaction pipe and smoke it. People go missing daily. He is no exception. He is the RULE, in third-normal form.
Odd that this happened on the eve of the Vista launch. Sure hope he hasn't been relocated to a hostile country for a code review...