On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist, was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment.

Follow the story here.

Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

"The Amazon Mechanical Turk team has created a site where there are 40,000 images from the past 2-3 days that volunteers can search and flag images.  At mid-day today we are expecting another batch of images from the Canadian space agency, which retasked a satellite to fly over during the past 24 hours."

02/05/2007 Follow-up: This past Saturday I volunteered some of my time to the Mechanical Turk team effort. Today I received an email from the team explaining that some of the sample images I had reviewed were slightly enlarged and therefore would I refresh my browser and do it over again?

It is now day nine since Jim Gray has been reported missing. The Coast Guard called off the search on day five. The Coast Guard has been doing search and rescue at sea for a long time, and they know what they're doing. Looking over images where Jim's boat MIGHT HAVE BEEN nine days ago is fruitless, in my opinion. At least for the purpose of rescuing Jim Gray...