Are you middle class?

I took this little survey in the Washington Post that takes into account your income, number of dependents, and region of the country you live in, and it tells me that I am officially and totally middle class. I’m right smack in the center of the arbitrarily defined boundaries that delimit “middle class” — and that the way I got to this point was by getting rid of those pesky kids who were holding me back. Fifteen years ago, I discovered, I was way down deep in lower middle class territory.

Your household has a middle-class income, and you have the financial security associated with the middle class. Your income is similar to others in your Zip code above the median for rural Minnesota. Rural Minnesota is an inexpensive place to live, and you would still be considered middle income anywhere in the country.

It’s a comfortable place to be, but there is no hope that I will ever be wealthy. That’s good enough.

I won’t ask you what class you fall into, because only a grifter cares about that sort of thing.

Will my Mac fly?

A MacOS port of No Man’s Sky dropped this past week. Let’s try it out! This will be a short stream (half hour?) at 10 Central time today, and I’ll give it a quick trial.

This is all shiny and new, so I’m not going to be shocked if it crashes a few times. I also have no idea about performance — I’ve been running this on an Intel machine running PopOS Linux before this, and now I’m going to try it on a Mac Mini with an M1 chip and 16GB. Fingers crossed — it would be nice to see the Mac become a viable machine for gaming.


Wow, that went smoothly. No crashes. Performance was far better on my inexpensive little Mac then it is on my bigger, fancier Linux box (but to be fair, the Linux machine is 7 or 8 years old).

Apologies if you tuned in expecting nothing but gamer/gearhead talk, I mainly chattered away about our current research project. And spiders, naturally.

We’re in the Spider-Verse now

We’re in summer research training mode. Mary & I took one of our students to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse so that she could learn what the life of an arachnologist is like.

It was a little more kinetic and colorful than I expected. But good! These spider-verse movies are spectacular and intense.

To bring us back down to earth, this morning we’re headed out to Glacial Lakes State Park for some real spidering, which is a little more sedate.

Tina Turner has died

One of the most energetic voices of my youth is no more.

In a statement on Wednesday night, a representative said: “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”

Who is going to run the Thunderdome in the absence of Aunty Entity?