Thanks to an article on Kiplinger.com I found a few companies that do offer full replacement cost insurance.

About a year ago I wrote about how I could not find anyone who would pay for a full replacement on your house.

So here are two companies I am going to ask for a quote from.

http://www.chubb.com/

http://www.firemansfund.com/

I am about to open a Roth IRA for myself and my wife, and at first there won't be much diversification, since I won't have enough to meet the minimums on several funds at once. But that is ok, because you don't need to be diversified in every account, as long as the total of all of your investments matches your asset allocation right?

So I was calculating what my asset allocation would be after opening the Roth IRAs and I had a problem. It's not really fair to compare $3000 in a Roth to $3000 in a traditional IRA, since I will owe taxes on the traditional when I withdraw the money, but I will not on the Roth.

Here is what I did. I assumed that my average tax rate on the IRA withdraws would be 20%. I have no idea if that is correct or not, but here is my thinking. I probably will have a marginal tax rate of 25%. (2007 25% bracket is 63,700 - 128,500) I probably won't have enough earned income + social security (only partly taxed) for all of my IRA withdraws to be taxed at 25%, so I took off 5% and came up with 20%.

So for my asset allocation I took the present value of my IRA - 20% and then added the full present value of my Roth IRA.

Then I am trying to hit an allocation of 10% Vanguard Total Bond Mkt Index, 67.5% Vanguard Total Stock Mkt Index, 22.5% Vanguard Total Int'l Stock Index.

So if I had $2250 in international in my Roth, and $8437.50 in Total Stock Market ($8437.50 - 20% = $6750) and $1250 in bonds ($1250 - 20% = $1000) both in a Traditional IRA; then if you combined the after-tax values of both accounts then I have achieved my desired asset allocation.

I hope that 20% is a good assumption for a retirement tax rate, or else everything else is wrong.

Ok, perhaps I should just calm down, but I have heard more and more people using "upped" as a verb. Even in newspaper stories!

Now, I don't know about you, but I always thought that prices were "raised" not "upped". Up is a preposition, not a verb. Prices can go up, they can follow an upward trend, they rise, but they do not "up".

I looked on m-w.com and they do have an entry for up as a verb, but I still think it is wrong and should be struck from the English language.

Let's take this sentence and play with it a little: "The builder upped the price for the house." Very much like something you have heard before. Now let's change one word. "The builder upped the walls for the house." Sounds stupid doesn't it. You don't "up" walls, you raise them. Well, you don't "up" prices either.

See also "as per is evil".

This is probably not interesting to anyone other than me and Andy Kragick.

There are two MIL-STD-1553 specifications. MIL-STD-1553A was published in 1975 and MIL-STD-1553B was published in 1978. I have been trying to figure out an exhaustive list of the differences and I think I finally have it.

There is a very useful document at http://www.utmc.com/ProductFiles/AppNotes/MILhbk1553a.pdf which is the military's handbook for 1553.

There are some electrical tolerance differences, but from the software perspective the differences are:

In 1553A mode codes must use subaddress 0, but in 1553B mode codes can use either subaddress 0 or 31.

1553B uses RT address 31 as the broadcast address, 1553A does not permit broadcast, so address 31 is a normal RT.

In 1553A only mode code 0 was defined, the others were implementation defined. But in 1553B, all mode codes 0-31 were specifically defined, or prohibited as reserved. Mode codes 0-15 do not have an associated data word, but codes 16-31 do have a single associated data word. The T/R bit determines whether the BC or the RT sends the single data word.

In 1553A only the message error and terminal flag bits are defined in the status word, all other status bits are implementation defined. In 1553B all 11 status bits are either defined or reserved.

I have linked to an article from the CATO institute which questions the common statistic that 10% of Americans are going hungry.

The author suggests that perhaps 1% would be more fair. Even that seems high to me, these are just survey results after all. There might be a margin of error greater than 1%. And I just read over the survey. There weren't any questions that asked about household income, and there weren't any options for anything like: "I qualify for food stamps but just haven't bothered to sign up" or even "My children don't get enough to eat because I spent all my money on cigarettes"

It really burns me that some liars even claim that 20% of all children are going to bed hungry every night. I wish I could find a recording of their shameful radio commercial that pushed that particular lie.