Large Scale Biology in Vacaville, California is doing just that. They use tobacco.
The reason that so many GMO efforts focus on food crops is that many of these crops have well understood genetics and are extremely productive in converting sunlight to biomass.
Greenhouses could be used, but the extreme expense could invalidate one of the main purposes of complex molecule production in plants: cost.
TNF in your gut would be digested into small, biologically inactive peptides. Nutritious and delicious!
Are GMOs really that scary? Hollywood and some environmental activists would have you believe that genetic engineering is a fusion of Frankenstein's monster and an out of control grass fire. The concepts of relative risk and benefits are rarely discussed. There is also the laughable notion that agriculture is a pristine environment which can only be tainted by GMOs.
Wake up. Most plants and animals associated with agriculture are
not native to the region in which they are grown
heavily inbred and hardly recognizable
displacing the "natural" biota
a huge source of pesticides, fertilizers, and waste products
heavily dependent on fossil fuel
Modified crops can and will turn sunlight into complex molecules for industry and medicine. There is already an addressed need to monitor our food supply for chemicals and pathogens. So new tests and controls are now necessary. So what?
A friend of mine is a biologist and dog trainer. She also suggested working with dogs. I suppose if I had the time, then yes, I would like to work with dogs. Who remembers Frank Herbert's chairdogs? I first read Dune in the seventh grade. My father and I have been joking about chairdogs ever since.
As a biologist, I have spent a lot of time reverse engineering life. If I had the time and funding, I would pursue my hobby of forward engineering life. A lot of subsumptive architecture theory in the field of robotics focuses on emulating insects. I figured I just use insects as the platform to begin with. I am experimenting with bees right now, but would like to start working with other insects. It would be heaven to hack at it full time.
"So, what you're saying is that open-source is helping to cure cancer in the same way that the pencils the scientists are using are helping to save cancer."
Let's review your syllogism:
A pencil is a tool.
Clinical research generated at a cost of billions and shared in an open and standard fashion is a tool.
Proven algorithms are tools.
Therefore, open source bioinformatics data and tools have the same worth as a pencil.
You remind me of Steve Martin's routine "How to turn a fortune in real estate into $25 in cash!", but he was being funny as a jerk.
It is unfortunate that some people were given brains when a spinal chord would suffice. - Albert Einstein
In spite of Microsoft claims to the contrary, open source is helping to cure cancer.
Sagres Discovery (my employer) takes advantage of naturally occuring retroviruses in mice to identify genes that cause cancer. This isn't novel technology (in fact its been around for nearly 20 years), but Sagres has turned it into a high throughput saturation screen with robotics,open source bioinformatics tools, and clustered Linux computing.
The Bioinformatics Open Souce Conference conference was held in Endmonton, Canada last week. In one of many projects moving towards open source standards and information, the National Cancer Institute announced caBIO, an open API for accessing NCI's comprehensive cancer databases.
An OSX user I know was impressed by Apples performance claims with BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) and challenged my dual AMD to a drag race. We went through some wild contortions to find a benchmarking condition in which his similarly priced Apple box could win a race (mucking about with word sizes), but the AMD box won by a significant margin. OSX will likely appeal to bioinformatics tool users as well as at least some tool makers.
In 1995, my wife and I rebuilt a 1977 VW bus and left the West Coast for a three month tour of the Southwest. One of the best decisions we made was to bring along an amatuer astronomy book and a pair of binoculars. We spent many nights wrapped up in mummy bags on lawn chairs alternatively finding new (to us) features, listening to the coyotes howl, and drinking freshly made cups of Peet's coffee. We were content with our equipment until we spotted a man in Jaoshua tree with a brand new camper EuroVan and a beautiful telescope. Looking back, however, the van, book, and binoculars were the best choices for our budget, skill levels, and do it ourself attitudes.
Open source bioinformatics tools
on
Open-Source Biology
·
· Score: 2, Informative
1] Longer battery life Longer than what? The Sharp Zaurus claims 8 hours. Backup rechargable batteries and chargers are available.
2] An actual keyboard (or a stylus that works) The Zaurus has a built in qwerty keyboard in addition to four stylus-based options.
3] Upgrade-able software The Zaurus runs on Linux comes preinstalled with typical PDA software and already has an open source development community behind it.
4] Lots, LOTS of memory Zaurus has CF and SD/MMC options for cards and mini-drives.
5] Ofcourse, the ability to run in a Beowulf cluster... With networking available via usb, wired/wireless, and infrared, it is only a matter of time.;-)
Gladwell's article does less to discount the successes of lone inventors than to support the successes of hackers, working alone or within an established research lab.
It is entirely possible to "invent" within a single, narrowly defined discipline. This happens most often in science as discoveries of fundamental principles or emergent phenomena. The inventor may or may not reduce the discovery to a technology, but he probably has a deep understanding of his discipline.
The successful hacker must not only be grounded in scientific fundamentals, but also have an archivists understanding of technology. Each technology can be seen as a potential member of a hacker's tool kit. The best hackers exploit multiple disciplines, crack finished technology into modular components, and rebuild to suite their vision.
We happen to living in an independent hacker's paradise: open access to science and "dumpsters" full of juicy tidbits. It isn't all hardware, either.
"Laptops are a lot like bicycles: if you have a 50-pound laptop, it doesn't need a lock."
On the contrary, they make great low power cluster nodes. Jusd leave yours here, I'll watch after it while your gone.;-)
Re:The problem behind the problem
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 1
OK, I certainly DO have empathy for your position in the professor/grad student relationship. Professors often view their students as an implementation "resource", which meets their needs, but runs counter to the whole point of earning a doctorate.
I recommend that you:
Analyze all your data and be well into the next step before you discuss results with your professor (let him/her play catch up)
Start your own project as soon as possible and stay at least two steps ahead of your professor and any other students, lest they get placed on your project.
I was very stubborn about this method and earned my doctorate in 3.5 years in a lab where 6 years (and the student as implementor relationship) was the norm. In the end, I was regarded as an "independant thinker" and offered a postdoc in the same lab (which I turned down). I still find these methods useful today.
Re:The problem behind the problem
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 1
"Perhaps he [the biologist] has a mathematition [your spelling] there somewhere too to help out with the algorithms, but in the end he does no 'real' work himself except to come up with the idea."
So in your opinion, coming up with the idea isn't real work? I could not disagree more. Biology domain knowlege drives bioinformatics. Your project may be "specific", but I'll bet it is specific only because of a comprehensive understanding of the problem by at least one biologist.
As far as using CS expertise, that depends on the problem and the applicable skills of the biologist. I have a doctorate in biology, but no formal training in CS and yet I have been able to write my own code and/or modify open source tools which run in a high throughput, clustered linux environment constructed by... me. I have also developed (an admittedly shallow, but growing) working knowlege of classic algorithms and associated data structures. Does my implementation constitute real work?
Do I value CS, math, and statistics professionals? Of course! I rely on open source tools and the linux movement as much as the biology community. I don't pretend that I invented domain knowlege in biology, computer science, or math. I suppose my best "skill" is to put my pride aside and ask questions, read, and learn from multiple coommunities. Depending on the community, I ask as a newbie, novice, or expert. I believe in the value of sharing to such an extent that I started a bioinformatics interest group.
I say this as a bioinformatician working in industry who spent two winters of his career stuck in a remote part of Switzerland with nothing but a laptop and an early release of slackware.;-)
My research team uses a high throughput mouse model system to identify mouse oncogenes and their human orthologues. We are fortunate enough to have access to both the public and Celera mouse/human genomes and have made detailed gene structure comparisons between hundreds of mouse and human genes and synteny comparisons between thousands of genes. Gene regulation and alternative splicing theories aside (both valid), there are certainly enough structural difference between mouse and human genes to obviate the need to invoke "missing genes". A better argument would be to focus on the known limitations of gene finding algorithms and the imperfections in EST and genome assemblies.
Are there missing genes in the public and private databases? Certainly. Until there is a full length clone, each gene call is a hypothesis. Ongoing curation will continue to sort out both false negatives and false positives.
There is a lot of sequence redundancy in the public databases, because most of the sequences are not assembled into complete genomes. I work with mouse and human and the best assmblies are at Celera. I think each assembly is under 1 GB as compressed flat files (which is how they are stored and searched with BLAST and FASTA), but that only represents the assemblies. The whole package is about 30GB and includes annotations and mapped sequence features (pre-computes). Although this data is not public, I believe its size is a fair estimate of what the public will grow into. Of course, once you have all that data, you will be wanting to decorate it with your own work. I think data transfer may be a larger issue. Tape and DSL?
As point of fact, I am a scientist and I played a direct role in engineering a virus based biopesticide (baculovirus). I am absolutely convinced that biopesticides and engineered plants can be a safe component of farming technology. I am also convinced that corporations can not be trusted to design the best comprehensive technologies and certainly should not be trusted with our seed banks. If this topic concerns you, then send some funding to, or roll up your sleeves with, one of the above organizations.
I recently gave a presentation for the Central Valley Bioinformatics Users Group (www.cvbig.org) titled "Clustering BLAST with Linux, Perl, PHP, and Postgres". Some of the slides are available here. I say some, because I just started the process of open sourcing my work. Management at Sagres Discovery (my employer) has been very receptive to releasing my code. And why not? My involvement in the open source community (and CVBIG in particular) taps the company into large reservoir of skills and experience (not to mention potential employees). Besides, open sourcing the tools does not mean open sourcing discoveries. Bioinformatics will continue to benefit from the open source movement. Fortunately, many in academia and industry recognize its value.
"The student is not "low-cost", they are PAYING to work for the university."
On the contrary, many Universities offer stipends and paid research positions. I never paid tuition and earned (an admittedly miserable) $1000/month. Of course, I'd feel a little better about it if my professor wasn't earning six figures the entire time.
It is an unfortunate reality that the goals and motivations of professors are not always aligned with their graduate students. A professor, even one that places their students interest as a priority, usually spends the majority of his time chasing funding. Most universities take ~50% of each grant to support facilities and non-research staff and there is a significant amount of pressure on the professor coming from his own department to acquire funding. This requires a large effort publishing, speaking, and writing grants. In a PR sense, the professor is selling himself and the granting institutions and the world at large view his laboratory and students as an extension of the professor. Optimally, the student graduates with a good education, solid research experience, and a few publications from a lab with an established track record. This is the best case scenario.
Unfortunately, dwindling grant sources have placed even more pressure on the acquisition of funding. The universities view patent royalties as a viable alternative to grants within technological fields and most have "technology transfer" groups specializing in harvesting intellectual property from labs and transforming it into funds. This system effectively funnels discovery from a large number of faculty, staff, and students into business group independent of the inventors. Students seldom gain any profit from these activities. Furthermore, not all professors give priority to their mentoring resposibility. On the contrary, many professors treat students as temporary low wage labor to be used to generate data (to publish, write grants, aquire funding, hire students...). Even students writing grants are seldom given intellectual credit within their field. Credit is reserved for the professor by default and even a conscientious professor usually has difficulty time distributing credit.
A graduate student's long years of toil used to be rewarded with an academic position. Professors and students justified the inbalaces of credit a temporary phase within an academic career. This has changed. Today, academic opportunities are far more limited and a student is fare less likely to remain within academia. As a result, the student has in fact become temporary low cost labor. More conflicts will occur as students recognize this.
Fear Not: Pick and Choose
on
Perl6 for Mortals
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why all the griping? Am I also supposed to feel inadequate or frightened because I've not mastered Perl 5 and am now faced with Perl 6? Afraid not. I may not be a Perl wizard, but my scripts do some heavy lifting.
As a biologist turned bioinformatics programmer, I find Perl to be a fantastic tool. Bioinformatics Perl = string processing and glue. My Perl scripts move LARGE numbers of sequences in and out of Postgres DBs, feed and clean up after a variety of open source tools (written in C, python, tcl, and perl), serve up web based tools, and all within a clustered linux environment.
I openly admit to cracking the camel book and visiting cpan on a regular basis. I do this not because I'm a slave to a complex language, but because I find Perl and its associated community to be a rich source of tools. I harvest what I need to get the job done now.
My every day commuter is an Optima Baron purchased through yellowbike.com. I've hit 32 mph on a completely flat road with no wind and have maintained in excess of 25 mph for just under ten miles. This unfaired, very low recumbent has turned my morning commute into a daily time trial.
Perhaps a condensation resistant rating should be included. We had an executive leave his bleeding edge laptop in his car overnight. By morning, every external and internal surface was slick with condensation. It booted eventually (after drying at room temperature for an hour), but I wondered what permenant damage was done.
Slashdot Mirror
Large Scale Biology in Vacaville, California is doing just that. They use tobacco.
The reason that so many GMO efforts focus on food crops is that many of these crops have well understood genetics and are extremely productive in converting sunlight to biomass.
Greenhouses could be used, but the extreme expense could invalidate one of the main purposes of complex molecule production in plants: cost.
TNF in your gut would be digested into small, biologically inactive peptides. Nutritious and delicious!
Wake up. Most plants and animals associated with agriculture are
- not native to the region in which they are grown
- heavily inbred and hardly recognizable
- displacing the "natural" biota
- a huge source of pesticides, fertilizers, and waste products
- heavily dependent on fossil fuel
Modified crops can and will turn sunlight into complex molecules for industry and medicine. There is already an addressed need to monitor our food supply for chemicals and pathogens. So new tests and controls are now necessary. So what?A friend of mine is a biologist and dog trainer. She also suggested working with dogs. I suppose if I had the time, then yes, I would like to work with dogs. Who remembers Frank Herbert's chairdogs? I first read Dune in the seventh grade. My father and I have been joking about chairdogs ever since.
As a biologist, I have spent a lot of time reverse engineering life. If I had the time and funding, I would pursue my hobby of forward engineering life. A lot of subsumptive architecture theory in the field of robotics focuses on emulating insects. I figured I just use insects as the platform to begin with. I am experimenting with bees right now, but would like to start working with other insects. It would be heaven to hack at it full time.
"So, what you're saying is that open-source is helping to cure cancer in the same way that the pencils the scientists are using are helping to save cancer."
Let's review your syllogism:
A pencil is a tool.
Clinical research generated at a cost of billions and shared in an open and standard fashion is a tool.
Proven algorithms are tools.
Therefore, open source bioinformatics data and tools have the same worth as a pencil.
You remind me of Steve Martin's routine "How to turn a fortune in real estate into $25 in cash!", but he was being funny as a jerk.
It is unfortunate that some people were given brains when a spinal chord would suffice. - Albert Einstein
In spite of Microsoft claims to the contrary, open source is helping to cure cancer.
Sagres Discovery (my employer) takes advantage of naturally occuring retroviruses in mice to identify genes that cause cancer. This isn't novel technology (in fact its been around for nearly 20 years), but Sagres has turned it into a high throughput saturation screen with robotics,open source bioinformatics tools, and clustered Linux computing.
The Bioinformatics Open Souce Conference conference was held in Endmonton, Canada last week. In one of many projects moving towards open source standards and information, the National Cancer Institute announced caBIO, an open API for accessing NCI's comprehensive cancer databases.
An OSX user I know was impressed by Apples performance claims with BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) and challenged my dual AMD to a drag race. We went through some wild contortions to find a benchmarking condition in which his similarly priced Apple box could win a race (mucking about with word sizes), but the AMD box won by a significant margin.
OSX will likely appeal to bioinformatics tool users as well as at least some tool makers.
In 1995, my wife and I rebuilt a 1977 VW bus and left the West Coast for a three month tour of the Southwest. One of the best decisions we made was to bring along an amatuer astronomy book and a pair of binoculars. We spent many nights wrapped up in mummy bags on lawn chairs alternatively finding new (to us) features, listening to the coyotes howl, and drinking freshly made cups of Peet's coffee.
We were content with our equipment until we spotted a man in Jaoshua tree with a brand new camper EuroVan and a beautiful telescope. Looking back, however, the van, book, and binoculars were the best choices for our budget, skill levels, and do it ourself attitudes.
Get open source bioinformatics tools from:
bioinformatics.org
bioperl.org
biojava.org
and even www.cvbig.org for a talk on bioinformatics with PHP/Ming
>He still hasn't denied working for Sharp...
Doh! Sharp Zaurus. I do not work for nor own stock in Sharp or any other hardware company.
>Why do I feel like you work for Zaurus?
How should I know? Because you're paranoid? I don't work for _Zenith_ (Zaurus is a PDA _model_ and i don't for it either).
>Why not (large number) hours battery life?
'Cause fast processors and nice displays suck juice, you want your PDA to weigh less than several pounds, and you can't argue with physics.
1] Longer battery life
Longer than what? The Sharp Zaurus claims 8 hours. Backup rechargable batteries and chargers are available.
2] An actual keyboard (or a stylus that works)
The Zaurus has a built in qwerty keyboard in addition to four stylus-based options.
3] Upgrade-able software
The Zaurus runs on Linux comes preinstalled with typical PDA software and already has an open source development community behind it.
4] Lots, LOTS of memory
Zaurus has CF and SD/MMC options for cards and mini-drives.
5] Ofcourse, the ability to run in a Beowulf cluster...
With networking available via usb, wired/wireless, and infrared, it is only a matter of time.;-)
Gladwell's article does less to discount the successes of lone inventors than to support the successes of hackers, working alone or within an established research lab.
It is entirely possible to "invent" within a single, narrowly defined discipline. This happens most often in science as discoveries of fundamental principles or emergent phenomena. The inventor may or may not reduce the discovery to a technology, but he probably has a deep understanding of his discipline.
The successful hacker must not only be grounded in scientific fundamentals, but also have an archivists understanding of technology. Each technology can be seen as a potential member of a hacker's tool kit. The best hackers exploit multiple disciplines, crack finished technology into modular components, and rebuild to suite their vision.
We happen to living in an independent hacker's paradise: open access to science and "dumpsters" full of juicy tidbits. It isn't all hardware, either.
"Laptops are a lot like bicycles: if you have a 50-pound laptop, it doesn't need a lock."
;-)
On the contrary, they make great low power cluster nodes. Jusd leave yours here, I'll watch after it while your gone.
I recommend that you:
- Analyze all your data and be well into the next step before you discuss results with your professor (let him/her play catch up)
- Start your own project as soon as possible and stay at least two steps ahead of your professor and any other students, lest they get placed on your project.
I was very stubborn about this method and earned my doctorate in 3.5 years in a lab where 6 years (and the student as implementor relationship) was the norm. In the end, I was regarded as an "independant thinker" and offered a postdoc in the same lab (which I turned down). I still find these methods useful today."Perhaps he [the biologist] has a mathematition [your spelling] there somewhere too to help out with the algorithms, but in the end he does no 'real' work himself except to come up with the idea."
... me. I have also developed (an admittedly shallow, but growing) working knowlege of classic algorithms and associated data structures. Does my implementation constitute real work?
;-)
So in your opinion, coming up with the idea isn't real work? I could not disagree more. Biology domain knowlege drives bioinformatics. Your project may be "specific", but I'll bet it is specific only because of a comprehensive understanding of the problem by at least one biologist.
As far as using CS expertise, that depends on the problem and the applicable skills of the biologist. I have a doctorate in biology, but no formal training in CS and yet I have been able to write my own code and/or modify open source tools which run in a high throughput, clustered linux environment constructed by
Do I value CS, math, and statistics professionals? Of course! I rely on open source tools and the linux movement as much as the biology community. I don't pretend that I invented domain knowlege in biology, computer science, or math. I suppose my best "skill" is to put my pride aside and ask questions, read, and learn from multiple coommunities. Depending on the community, I ask as a newbie, novice, or expert. I believe in the value of sharing to such an extent that I started a bioinformatics interest group.
I say this as a bioinformatician working in industry who spent two winters of his career stuck in a remote part of Switzerland with nothing but a laptop and an early release of slackware.
My research team uses a high throughput mouse model system to identify mouse oncogenes and their human orthologues. We are fortunate enough to have access to both the public and Celera mouse/human genomes and have made detailed gene structure comparisons between hundreds of mouse and human genes and synteny comparisons between thousands of genes. Gene regulation and alternative splicing theories aside (both valid), there are certainly enough structural difference between mouse and human genes to obviate the need to invoke "missing genes". A better argument would be to focus on the known limitations of gene finding algorithms and the imperfections in EST and genome assemblies.
Are there missing genes in the public and private databases? Certainly. Until there is a full length clone, each gene call is a hypothesis. Ongoing curation will continue to sort out both false negatives and false positives.
CVBIG!
There is a lot of sequence redundancy in the public databases, because most of the sequences are not assembled into complete genomes. I work with mouse and human and the best assmblies are at Celera. I think each assembly is under 1 GB as compressed flat files (which is how they are stored and searched with BLAST and FASTA), but that only represents the assemblies. The whole package is about 30GB and includes annotations and mapped sequence features (pre-computes). Although this data is not public, I believe its size is a fair estimate of what the public will grow into. Of course, once you have all that data, you will be wanting to decorate it with your own work. I think data transfer may be a larger issue. Tape and DSL?
"There is no Linux for drinking water, you know."
Well from a spectrum of mainstream to full on radicals there are these organizations:
Sierra Club
Greenpeace
Earth First!
As point of fact, I am a scientist and I played a direct role in engineering a virus based biopesticide (baculovirus). I am absolutely convinced that biopesticides and engineered plants can be a safe component of farming technology. I am also convinced that corporations can not be trusted to design the best comprehensive technologies and certainly should not be trusted with our seed banks. If this topic concerns you, then send some funding to, or roll up your sleeves with, one of the above organizations.
I recently gave a presentation for the Central Valley Bioinformatics Users Group (www.cvbig.org) titled "Clustering BLAST with Linux, Perl, PHP, and Postgres". Some of the slides are available here. I say some, because I just started the process of open sourcing my work. Management at Sagres Discovery (my employer) has been very receptive to releasing my code. And why not? My involvement in the open source community (and CVBIG in particular) taps the company into large reservoir of skills and experience (not to mention potential employees). Besides, open sourcing the tools does not mean open sourcing discoveries. Bioinformatics will continue to benefit from the open source movement. Fortunately, many in academia and industry recognize its value.
"The student is not "low-cost", they are PAYING to work for the university."
On the contrary, many Universities offer stipends and paid research positions. I never paid tuition and earned (an admittedly miserable) $1000/month. Of course, I'd feel a little better about it if my professor wasn't earning six figures the entire time.
It is an unfortunate reality that the goals and motivations of professors are not always aligned with their graduate students. A professor, even one that places their students interest as a priority, usually spends the majority of his time chasing funding. Most universities take ~50% of each grant to support facilities and non-research staff and there is a significant amount of pressure on the professor coming from his own department to acquire funding. This requires a large effort publishing, speaking, and writing grants. In a PR sense, the professor is selling himself and the granting institutions and the world at large view his laboratory and students as an extension of the professor. Optimally, the student graduates with a good education, solid research experience, and a few publications from a lab with an established track record. This is the best case scenario.
Unfortunately, dwindling grant sources have placed even more pressure on the acquisition of funding. The universities view patent royalties as a viable alternative to grants within technological fields and most have "technology transfer" groups specializing in harvesting intellectual property from labs and transforming it into funds. This system effectively funnels discovery from a large number of faculty, staff, and students into business group independent of the inventors. Students seldom gain any profit from these activities. Furthermore, not all professors give priority to their mentoring resposibility. On the contrary, many professors treat students as temporary low wage labor to be used to generate data (to publish, write grants, aquire funding, hire students...). Even students writing grants are seldom given intellectual credit within their field. Credit is reserved for the professor by default and even a conscientious professor usually has difficulty time distributing credit.
A graduate student's long years of toil used to be rewarded with an academic position. Professors and students justified the inbalaces of credit a temporary phase within an academic career. This has changed. Today, academic opportunities are far more limited and a student is fare less likely to remain within academia. As a result, the student has in fact become temporary low cost labor. More conflicts will occur as students recognize this.
Why all the griping? Am I also supposed to feel inadequate or frightened because I've not mastered Perl 5 and am now faced with Perl 6? Afraid not. I may not be a Perl wizard, but my scripts do some heavy lifting.
As a biologist turned bioinformatics programmer, I find Perl to be a fantastic tool. Bioinformatics Perl = string processing and glue. My Perl scripts move LARGE numbers of sequences in and out of Postgres DBs, feed and clean up after a variety of open source tools (written in C, python, tcl, and perl), serve up web based tools, and all within a clustered linux environment.
I openly admit to cracking the camel book and visiting cpan on a regular basis. I do this not because I'm a slave to a complex language, but because I find Perl and its associated community to be a rich source of tools. I harvest what I need to get the job done now.
My every day commuter is an Optima Baron purchased through yellowbike.com. I've hit 32 mph on a completely flat road with no wind and have maintained in excess of 25 mph for just under ten miles. This unfaired, very low recumbent has turned my morning commute into a daily time trial.
Geek speed!
Perhaps a condensation resistant rating should be included. We had an executive leave his bleeding edge laptop in his car overnight. By morning, every external and internal surface was slick with condensation. It booted eventually (after drying at room temperature for an hour), but I wondered what permenant damage was done.