Democracy, the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, is also about force projection. Corporations may represent the future of democracies. Red giants represent the future of most stars out in the universe; therefore, we here on Earth have to begin to be serious: our earth is threatened by the Sun.

By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. -2 Pet. 3:7

Having to pay to run for office for a Parliament that is irrelevant because it's "Space Nation" is a monarchy whose constitution gives total control to a space king is actually a surprisingly accurate prediction of what living off planet will probably look like in the future. It's only been 8 years and we've already devolved to what was broadly recognized as the worst form of government by humans hundreds of years ago as this "social experiment" speed-runs it's way to a full on virtual feudal state. Can't wait to claim my role as a space-serf haha

Followers of The Gaian Way are called Gaians.  Gaians understand Earth as a planetary organism. With this perspective, life and ecosystems act together as a meta-organism called Gaia. The name is taken from the Ancient Greek myths about the mother goddess of nature and was also used by James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s. This was the beginning of science looking at Earth as a self-regulating life system that we all live among. Here, we are all a part of Gaia.  From this perspective Gaians look at our roles, rights and responsibilities as human beings living among Gaia.  Gaians recognize the biological bond humans have with Earth, and value the health and safety of Gaia. As hyper ecosystem engineers, humans have a role to participate in Gaia, the great life force. As we fulfill our role as ecosystem engineers and an emergent global species, these actions come with rights and responsibilities. Our most fundamental role is to continue the health and stability of Gaia. It is our right to have the full health and freedom that life allows. When Gaia is harmed, our rights are diminished. When Gaia is healthy, life thrives. Gaians therefore believe that human dominance of nature has resulted in harms like human-influenced climate change, ecosystem destruction and the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction. These aren’t just harmful to our own human species and the species we favor, these global actions tear at the very web on life on Earth itself. Nature, and all her various entities from rivers to forests, have rights too, and it is our responsibility to ensure those rights.  This is the ecological awareness of Gaianism, but there’s also an important emotional awareness. Our cultures, our lives, even our very sense of identity is all built on a relationship with nature. In divorcing ourselves, or attempting to, from nature we have also broken ourselves.  Now we must heal. Let us go forward as a species who understands that without Gaia, we would not live. Our lives depend on maintaining and restoring the beautiful life of Earth. Let us heal Gaia, let us bring forward a reconciliation between ourselves and Her, for we are Gaia. Ignoring that fact leads to death, first of the mind, then of the body.  There are many people that could be considered Gaians even though they aren’t aware of the practice. These are conservationists, farmers, teachers, gardeners, and others who have the same understanding of nature and our bond to it. Everyone who thinks, talks, writes, teaches and inspires others about our Earthbond with Gaia could very well be a Gaian. Are you?

I’ve been playing, running, and teaching tabletop roleplaying games for nearly 40 years, now. I realized along the way, that there are several life lessons that can be learned through this type of play and collective storytelling. One of the lessons is that teams built with intentional diversity will be more resilient to adversity, and overall more successful.

After about three years of inactivity I have returned to being an active member of Asgardia. It was time to pay the fee & become a resident. Now I look forward to seeing my nation expand & participating in the life of this first space nation however way I can. Today is a blessing of a day. Onward!

Language modeling: task of predicting what word comes next by assigning probability to text: P(x^1,…,x^T )=ΠP(x^t |x^(t-1):x^1) (1) Benchmark task that measures our progress in understanding language, and subcomponent of many NLP tasks. Log space. N-grams P≈n(x^(t+1):x^(t-n+2))/n(x^t:x^(t-n+2)) (2). Sparsity: smoothing (add small δ to count for every w∈V; backoff (condition on latter n-1 words). Storage: need to store count for all n-grams in corpus. Perplexity PP=√(N&Π_(i=1)^N 1/(P(w_i│w_1…w_(i-1)))) (3) is probability of test set, normalized by number of words. The lower, the better. Markov assumption is that future behavior of a dynamical system only depends on its recent history. In a kth-order Markov model, the next state only depends on the k most recent states. An N-gram is a (N-1)-order Markov model.