Help find Jim Gray

Like several of my colleagues, I’m reposting this piece from Werner’s blog in an effort to get it in front of as many people as possible:

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

UPDATE: Check Werner’s blog for the latest updates – there are new images to be examined, taken on a NASA ER-2 flight.

Back in California for the first time in 9 months (is this a record?)

I just flew into SFO for a short visit to California: two days of family get-togethers in Berkeley and Carmel, then three days of business meetings. (Amazon has several software teams here in the Bay Area, including A9 and Alexa.) I flew down on a UA 737: the plane was full, and it left an hour late, but the flight was otherwise uneventful. (And once again I sailed through SeaTac security without waiting in line; I’m not sure how I do it.)
During the flight I listened to channel 9, read the latest Economist, and browsed the Sky Mall catalog. I noticed that they’re already cashing in on the “no liquids or gels in carry-ons” stupidity; they were offering “his and hers” kits of “essential items” – shaving gear, shampoo, toothpaste, and so forth, enough for a week’s travel. They’ll mail it to your hotel, marked “Hold for arrival”. I don’t remember the pricing, but it looked like something of a rip-off – but how much is it worth to avoid the hassle from TSA? Of course they could simply sell them at the airport: I bought some toothpaste after I’d gone through security, saving me the bother of hunting for a pharmacy near my hotel. (Or perhaps disposable razors are still forbidden…..)
As I pointed my rental car south on 101, I realized that it felt like a long time since I was last here. I just checked (blogs are useful for that), and it’s been nine months. Back in April I spent a week here and in Denver doing “intensive networking” as part of my post-Sun transition. I don’t think I’ve been away from Silicon Valley for this long since… wow, probably the mid 80s.

Sullivan owes an apology

An email to Andrew Sullivan:

Subject: You owe an apology
From: “Geoff Arnold”
To: andrew@andrewsullivan.com
Date: Thu, February 1, 2007 11:27 am
To respond to someone who says this:
> I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility
> and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact
> with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this
> world a bit better than when I came into it… for my children and
> for the rest of humanity. I don’t do this because a particular
> flying spaghetti monster ordained that I do it and will punish me
> with his noodly appendage if I don’t. I do it because I have the
> power and I believe that it is better for me if I help those around
> me. What else would give my life more meaning than that?
with this
> But why is that more meaningful than flying a plane into the World
> Trade Center?
is something I would have expected from Pat Robertson or Bill
O’Reilly, or a Christianist but not from you. If you really can’t see
why, you’re a fool. If it was just a thoughtless rhetorical flourish,
you should be ashamed of yourself.

On the horizon: PT's "Fear of a Blank Planet"

Via my old schoolfriend Paul Smith, here’s a piece on Dave Ling‘s blog about the forthcoming Porcupine Tree album. Since I can’t see any way to get a permalink to the specific entry, I’m going to quote the relevant paragraph in full:

Yesterday morning I trundled along to Abbey Road Studios for a preview of Porcupine Tree’s forthcoming album, ‘Fear Of A Blank Planet’ in glorious 5.1 surround sound. Before the playback began, band leader Steven Wilson informed the gathered throng that the album is one “continuous piece of music” that lasts for around 53 minutes, explaining that most CDs these days are way too long to hold the listener’s attention. “It’s a very intense album”, he warned, adding that it includes no potential singles – something that hardly seemed to bother representatives from the quartet’s new label Roadrunner Records. And why should it? The album is simply stunning from start to finish; elaborately conceived, brilliantly orchestrated and executed with consummate sophistication. The track that will surely generate most attention is ‘Anesthetize’, which at 17 mins and 42 seconds long features a guitar solo from Rush’s Alex Lifeson. Robert Fripp of King Crimson also offers guest soundscape guitar effects to the penultimate song ‘Way Out Of Here’. But, believe me, the whole album is a stroke of genius.

Amazon.co.uk isn’t showing it as available for pre-order just yet, but according to the PT website it should be out in April. And just to tantalize us still more, “It’s likely that both the stereo CD and 5.1 surround sound DVDA will be packaged together as standard.” Mmm!!

A worthy successor to Rummie

It looks as if the White House has found a worthy successor to Donald Rumsfeld. Spencer Ackermann reports here on the confirmation hearings for Admiral Bill Fallon, the new commander of US forces in the Middle East. After dodging most of the questions, Fallon produced this gem:

Perhaps most egregiously, when hawkish Republican Senator Lindsay Graham fished for an endorsement of his view that the US can win in Iraq, Fallon commented, “I don’t know what ‘winning’ is,” before pausing, realizing that he might have just made some unfortunate headlines, and backpedaling.

Pinker on consciousness

There’s a wonderful piece by Steven Pinker in the latest Time, entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. After reviewing the state of research on consciousness and the brain, he considers Chalmers’ notorious “Hard question”, nods at Dan Dennett’s rebuttal, (appropriately) dismisses Searle’s quantum nonsense, and (provisionally) accepts Colin McGinn‘s “cognitive closure” view. He concludes optimistically:

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer….
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that “life is short.” It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Indeed it is. Enjoy.

Mushrooms and mysticism

Over at HuffPo, Mark Kleiman has a piece entitled Mushrooms and mysticism in which he reports on a remarkably thorough study into the effects of the “magic mushroom” hallucinogen psilocybin. The team at Johns Hopkins confirmed what most people would expect: psilocybin reliably (over 60% of the time) triggers a “full” mystical experience.
The author then starts in on the public policy issues: the fact that the National Institute on Drug Abuse wants to drop the whole thing, and the question of what happens when freedom of religious expression collides with drug policy:

If taking a dose of psilocybin under controlled conditions has a better-than-even chance of occasioning a full-blown mystical experience, it seems fairly hard to argue that forbidding such use doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of religion…. [The[ treaty banning psilocybin… seems to run squarely into the internationally recognized human right to religious practice, belief, and expression.

OK, I’m sure that those are important topics. But to me this study is just another nail in the coffin of religious experience as “evidence” for the supernatural. Four hundred years ago most people from Europe (including those taking over the Americas) were hard-core dualists: souls and other spirit-beings not only inhabited bodies, but could even invade them. Today, most intelligent people accept that a neuro-chemical brain malfunction (with genetic predisposition) is a better explanation than demonic possession for what we now call schizophrenia. Perhaps the overwhelming evidence for the natural, non-mystical origin of religious experience, coupled with facing up to non-issues like this will eventually banish “soulism” too. It’s about time.

"Venus", Kabul, and a nice coincidence

I caught the No. 16 bus up to Wallingford this afternoon, to go to see the movie “Venus”. Peter O’Toole was wonderful; highly recommended. Peter O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker in VenusI got there 20 minutes early, so I prowled around a bit, and found that the Kabul, Seattle’s (?only) Afghan restaurant, was just two blocks from the cinema. Chris took us there a few years ago, but we’d come by a different route, at night, so I didn’t recognize the neighbourhood. I couldn’t resist the opportunity, so when the film was over I hung out at the local Starbucks until the Kabul opened, and then had a great dinner.
While I was travelling in both directions, I was listening to an old favourite album on my iPod. When I got home, I checked NetNewsWire for new blog items and was surprised to find this over at Andrew Sullivan:

Sully was using it to illustrate this piece by Norm Geras. Good stuff, up to a point, but then he has to go and take a dig at Richard Dawkins. Perhaps he should read Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza (which I’m in the middle of), and pay attention to the subject of the Inquisition. Racism and torture in the name of divine love. Nauseating. Dawkins has it exactly right, in my opinion.