After a long 14 hour flight (not counting the connecting flight, and the additional 90 minutes train ride to get to the hotel), passing over the vast, beautiful, snowy landscape of Nunavut, the Northwest Territory, and the breathtaking Alaska Range, including majestic Mt. McKinley, I arrived last night in Tokyo for the BioHackathon 2008.
This event is a meeting of more than 60 programmers and service provider representatives from around the world to work on improving support for interoperability and web-services for the life sciences. Today we are on the 40th floor of Roppongi Hills, with an awesome sight on the dazzling sea of high-rises in Tokyo. As we learn later from Dr. Hideaki Sugawara, the Director of the CIB at DDBJ, today is also National Foundation Day, a public holiday celebrating the founding of the Japanese Nation.
