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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.
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.
I was one of the people who analyzed the U2 (actually ER-2) images. According to the headers, the images were obtained at 50,000 feet. Perhaps that is "low" for an ER-2. By the way, the footprint ofthe ER-2 images was small compared to the satellite images, which in turn were somewhat smaller than to the area searched by the Coast Guard
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.
Yes because everyone who works for Microsoft deserves to die.
You're such a nut job.
Wow, you are a fucking psychopath. Congratulations.
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.
... and don't mod me down, it's really what I think.
Not trolling here, but why should that be a reason not to mod you down?
It's worse than that ... you're dead, Jim!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
SELECT [Location] FROM [MissingPeople] WHERE [FirstName] = 'Jim' AND [LastName] = 'Gray'
Results: NULL
Oh my.
The camera array on NASA's ER2 is a tad more sophisticated than simply a DSLR or two. The relatively limited and older IRIS system covers a strip approximately 40 nautical miles wide: exactly what kind of setup could accomplish this on a turboprop? I am not saying it could not be done, but it would take more than a few days of work. The possible selection of cameras on the ER-2 is listed in the first link, the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scales for civilian and military usage are 2nd and 3rd:
i /ER-2/cameras.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/AirSc
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/niirs_c/guide.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/niirs.htm
Maybe he was drinking... A one too many relationship.
"It's never the things that happen to us that upset us, it's our view of them." -Epictetus
Seriously, man, readjust your tinfoil hat, it's letting sanity sink in!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Convenience, basically. NASA has an old U-2 based at Ames, it has the right cameras for the job, and they have pilots who can fly a U-2.
People at Microsoft are not bad. (this coming from me, who loathes windows is quite a bit.) Some of them are quite full of themselves and rather blind nut that does not make them bad.
When you work for a corporation.. nobody works for any such person.. all of them work for this legal fiction called a corporation and its is not like a person.. its not able to make moral choices, the only thing it can do is make money.
Don't be blinded by hate. It's fine and dandy to hate a thing, but never hate on a person.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
...he went near the new CERN's accelerator, did he?
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.