akota

the 21st century pentagon

Price Floyd is is the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Public Affairs.  He has an impressive resume that includes 15 years of service in the State Department.  He has worked on a war crimes tribunal in Bosnia, in arms control and monitoring in Montenegro, and on earthquake relief in Pakistan.  Yet, I am most surprised by a more down-to-earth accomplishment: he created a Twitter feed for the Pentagon. http://twitter.com/defensegov.  Right now the feed is full of tweets about the relief effort in Haiti.  Nice work.

a change of career

Not your usual headline.  A minor league baseball player: "retires to pursue priesthood."  Reports mlb.com:

OAKLAND -- The A's announced Friday that Grant Desme, the only player in Minor League Baseball to go 30-30 in 2009, has decided to retire from the game in order to pursue the priesthood.

He was only in Single A; at 23 years old he had little chance of making the major leagues.  Nonetheless, it must have been a tough decision, and it shows quite a commitment to his new vocation.

expertise is tough to define

In Veritas v. Microsoft (W.D. Wash. Feb. 26, 2008), Microsoft was trying to discredit Veritas's expert on damages.  The court summarized his resume: "Michael J. Wagner is a C.P.A. and attorney with extensive experience serving as an expert in federal and state litigation regarding the calculation of commercial damages."  In his deposition the attorney for Microsoft really got to him:

Q: Not to be rude, but basically you considered all this information and then you kind of sit back and you just decide in your mind what you think is fair given the information you considered.

A: That's not an unfair characterization of what I do.

Ouch.  Nonetheless, the Court was "not persuaded by this one statement that Mr. Wagner's damages testimony is impermissibly speculative. His report is 123 pages long and contains a thorough and reasoned analysis."