Jim Gray Is Missing

K-Man writes "Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies, was reported missing at sea after a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. Gray is manager of Microsoft's eScience group. The Coast Guard is searching for his vessel over 4,000 square miles of ocean, and there have been no distress calls or signals of any kind. Gray is 63 and a sailor with 10 years' experience."

Mirror of SFGate News

[mfh]

SFGate's Report - Mirrored [sfgate.com]:

(01-29) 15:23 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. Coast Guard is looking for a San Francisco computer scientist who may be lost at sea after he failed to return from an outing to the Farallon Islands Sunday afternoon.

Jim Gray, 63, set out alone on his 40-foot sailboat, "Tenacious," Sunday morning and was expected back sometime that afternoon, officials said.

Gray is a prize-winning researcher and the manager of the Microsoft Science Group in downtown San Francisco.

His wife notified authorities at 8:35 p.m. Sunday after Gray failed to return and did not answer cell phone calls, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard searched all night with an aircraft, helicopter, coastal patrol boat and motor life boat, officials said, but found no sign of the missing vessel. They also found no signs of distress.

Officials said that Gray has more than 10 years of sailing experience and that his boat is "well-equipped with communication, safety and emergency gear."

The Farallon Islands are about 27 miles off the coast from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Re:Mirror of SFGate News

[Anonymous Coward]

Additional info about his Turing Award.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/0 5-14turing.mspx [microsoft.com]

Re:technologist needs to use technology?

[Strider-]

If he was going offshore, he either had or should have had an EPIRB [wikipedia.org] (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. In effect, when deployed they transmit a beacon signal at 406MHz that contains a unique identifier, and can also include GPS coordinates.

These signals are picked up by either the INMARSAT geostationary satellites, or also passing weather satellites. Without a GPS position, the weather satellites can locate the beacon to within about 50 miles. With an integrated GPS receiver, the position will be reported to about 2 miles or so. (The message format doesn't have the space to transmit full resolution).

More Info

[K-Man]

This story [slashdot.org] covers some of his recent database work.

Several news stories say that he called his daughter Sunday morning to say he was going out of cellphone range, but he didn't indicate any problems. The weather was clear, so it's puzzling that there were no sightings.

Re: Mirror of SFGate News

[Deviate_X]

For those interested in what he does theres a video interview on channel9 site:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4989 1 [msdn.com]

Possibly run down by a larger ship

[Animats]

He went out in a 40-foot C&C 121 yacht [c-cyachts.com]. That's a very nice boat, with a epoxy resin laminate hull, carbon fiber reinforcement and masts, Kevlar sails, and a 38HP engine. There hasn't been any weather lately bad enough to give a boat like that any serious trouble. If it ran aground it would probably survive the experience.

But between San Francisco and the Farralon Islands is a major shipping lane. One with fog. Container ships and oil tankers come through there. Sizable fishing boats have been run down and sunk without anyone on a large ship even noticing. There's a USGS Vessel Traffic Service [uscg.mil] station and established traffic lanes for large ships, but small boats aren't required to check in with traffic control.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please use the JOIN keyword when making joins.

Re:I know what happened....

[Bob of Dole]

A Cartesian join gives you every possible combination of two (or more) tables of information you give it. It's very easy to do in SQL (the primary database query language) because of how the syntax works, and it's very rarely what you actually want.

An example would be if you have an address book, listing about 50 people you know, with names and addresses (But no phone numbers)
You also have a phone book, with names and phone numbers of everyone in your city. Let's say 1 million people.

Let's say you've got an address ("12 Pear Tree"), and you want a phone number. To find this information you've got to use the address book to locate the name of the person living at that address, then look up that name in the phone book.
In SQL, you'd do that search like this:

select phone_number from phone_book,address_book where address_book.address="12 Pear Tree" and phone_book.name=address_book.name

It's saying "Find every address entry where the address is "12 pear tree", and out of all the possible combinations of address book entry and phone book entry, just give me the ones where the names match."
That'll give you the result you want. However, it's that last bit of SQL that's easy to forget, the "phone_book.name=address_book.name" bit. Without it, you're doing a Cartesian join. The database says "Ahh, they must want every combination of these two tables".
So instead of getting one result, you'll get one million results. The address has to be "12 pear tree", but the database is free to match that up with EVERY entry in the phone book, and it will.

That's what the grandparent post was referring to. SQL just makes that mistake very easy to make, and you'll end up with a GIANT pile of results flying at you if you make it.

Re:I know what happened....

[AikonMGB]

Which is one of (but not the only) reason I explicitly declare my joins. I would have written this query as:

select pb.phone_number from phone_book pb inner join address_book ab on ab.address = '12 Pear Tree' and ab.name = pb.name

But that's just me..

Aikon-

Re:The plot thickens!

[Mr Z]

Killer whales ARE dolphins. [wikipedia.org] Quoting Wikipedia:

The Orca or Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) is the largest species of the oceanic dolphin family (Delphinidae).

Hidden Dangers for Small Boats

[BoRegardless]

In addition to water temperature and ships posing lethality, there is one rarely talked about for any typical yacht. In my earlier years I designed sailboats, before I figured out it was all fun and no money.

I have a friend in high places at the Port of Los Angeles, and though the shipping companies do NOT like to talk about it, the ship grounding on the U.K. coast just a week ago illustrated the problem. Some dozens or a hundred containers or so came off the ship when it listed, and then some FLOATED ashore.

The numbers I have heard is about 10,000 containers a year 'go missing' overboard as a result of all sorts of problems in bad weather usually. I don't remember whether that was the Pacific only or worldwide.

Lots of these containers floating right near the water surface with any waves at all, are virtually impossible to see from any distance.

If you hit one in a fiberglass or a thin-skinned metal boat boat, you can take on water and sink in a minute or two if it is bad.

Lots of small boats go missing every year with no explanation.

Morning news

[FrenchSilk]

On the morning news in San Francisco, his daughter said that he had a marine radio aboard and a rubber dinghy. Let us hope for the best.

Re:Was using MS Sailor 2007 XP

[loose electron]

Agree with the above, he has only been gone less than 72 hours and he is on a 40 foot sailboat.

Cell phone will be useless out there, Marine band VHF will be good for line of sight off the mast (9 to 28 miles, YMMV) and nobody knows if he has a SSB rig on board.

Even with total equipment failure he should be good for at least a week. Pretty obvious that a lot of slash-dot folks don't do offshore sailing. Major concern is if he is solo on the boat, not tethered in, and goes over the side. Then you watch the boat sail (on autohelm) away from you, and then you are dead withing 3-4 hours from hypothermia.

If he know what he is doing, give him a few more days. If he is slopped in fog, does not have radar, he may be waiting for a combination of clear weather, and the right tides under the GG bridge. Need both right to get in under safely, especially if the motor has failed and you got to do it under sail. The 6-9 knots of tidal current under there are viscious. Also, the safest place to sit and wait is not near the channel where all the traffic is.

Too many variables, give him a few days.

Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT!

[fhic]

Heh. Funny you should mention it. A couple of weeks ago I rescued some young fool who thought it would be a good idea to go kayaking in the Pacific without proper gear. He fell off, got wet, got himself into a serious hypothermic crisis and had to be rescued by yours truly, an old fart who *was* properly prepared and knows his limitations. I guess I'm lucky that my cardiovascular system held up to the challenge, one more time. I'll head off to my rocking chair now. Thanks for the heads-up.