Once you know about it, there's also a lot of symbolic shorthand for recognition and the like.

Honoring a beloved medieval art historian professor of mine:

"It's more properly the Bayeux Embroidery"

Yeah - I don't want AI writing "notes" in the academic sense, but minutes.

Of course the problem with this for me (I'm a state employee) is that said transcript is a public record.

Sarah Taber has given some interesting talks about this - the short version is there is probably a fair amount of outbreaks caused by small farms, they just don't have the reach to be detected.

The FoodNet thing, while bad, has a bit of nuance in the system was not meant to do outbreak detection, so likely wouldn't have helped here.

But it does cripple our ability to ask if this was a one-off, or if we're seeing long term trends that should be worrisome.

It would have made identifying the source trivial. Instead we had waves of confused and confusing reports.

This. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, the number of people who will work their way into laboratory confirmed case reports is a small fraction of the total number of people impacted.

You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.

Honestly, I think we would do well to dispose of both "founder" and "startup".

We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".

They are not the same. Per VC culture, small business owner is a looser, tunning lifestyle business. They produce useful products in competitive markets and nurture relationship with customers.

Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.

Why, in particular, above any other aspect of society?

In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."

One of the things that struck me the most, watching keynote presentations from the absolute best-of-the-best in my field (infectious diseases) was how often those presentations, which were often reflections on the path of ones career, involved a liberal arts education.

Donald Michie, a trained classicist specialising on old Greek, was drafted to Bletchley Park and became a codebreaker (and Alan Turing's chess partner "because we were both not very good at it compared to the others" [personal comm.]). After WW II., he became a professor of veterenary sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and eventually he founded the department of artificial intelligence there. He is the editor of the first book series on machine learning (1950s).

In his lifetime, Michie published impactful papers in genetics, biology, statistics and computer science -- and classical philology.

A liberal arts education and a science education are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.