Jim Gray lost at sea

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daniel at 1:19 pm, February 3rd, 2007

Jim Gray, a major contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, has gone missing. From Rich Kron:

As many of you know, our colleague Jim Gray has been missing at sea since Sunday evening. He was sailing near San Francisco in good weather. He is a
highly experienced sailor, and the boat is well-instrumented. So far no
trace has been found, despite continuing, highly intensive searches.
He has had an enormous impact on our Collaboration. He has generously spent a large fraction of his time over the last 5 years to work with us to create the SDSS. Our thoughts are with him and his family, and we hope for his safe return.

There is an effort to help with the search. Details from Alex Szalay:

We are processing hi-rez satellite images with a 0.8m resolution into 512×512 JPG tiles. They are placed on a website for visual inspection. If you have a bit of free time over the weekend, please help in inspecting a few images.
It is a long shot, but everyone is getting pretty desperate. There is additional info, and in particular other images.

A news article on the search.

Miscellany
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8 Comments on “Jim Gray lost at sea” rss feed

spyder on Feb 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 pm

the most recent story, as of two hours ago…

“Private pilots, colleagues of Gray, and a corps of volunteers from Silicon Valley firms have stepped in to the breach, just as the Coast Guard was calling off its search after finding no sign of Tenacious, the 40-foot sailboat Gray had taken out Sunday to scatter his mother’s ashes near the Farallon Islands.”
Carl Brannen on Feb 4th, 2007 at 3:04 am

You need to specify a scale. If the photos cover 7000 square miles, then each clickable region is about 1/60 of this or 120 square miles. Each image is about 1/256 of this or about a 0.5 square miles = 12705000 square feet. That makes each pixel about 49 feet. Picking out a ship whose longest dimension is roughly one pixel is going to require considerable luck.

Or do the pictures cover 7000 square miles?
Analyzer on Feb 4th, 2007 at 8:28 am

The “images” link has a reference rectangle for you to use.
Joe Fitzsimons on Feb 4th, 2007 at 8:55 am

According to the link, it’s 0.8m resolution. The boat is about 10px*4px, from the image link.
Z on Feb 4th, 2007 at 3:20 pm

It’s a pity there is no software to automatically search photos for this kind of thing. There are hundreds of thousands of photo images to check.
zqhuang on Feb 4th, 2007 at 4:39 pm

Bless him.
Pingback from Ars Mathematica » Blog Archive » Jim Gray Missing on Feb 4th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

[...] Update. Cosmic Variance has more about Gray. He was a major contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. [...]
jon on Apr 2nd, 2007 at 10:16 am

such a genius

cant even survice a 3 hour tour

or be prepared with sat phone etc

« arxiv Find: Cycling in the Throat Unto Himself »

Jim Gray lost at sea

8 Comments on “Jim Gray lost at sea” rss feed

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