This is a test post.

GIST class notes for Monday, February 7

Go around the room, introduce your neighbor, say what portion of your body would you be willing to “put under the knife?”

- most of us say no surgery, specifically no cosmetic
- a few people willing to have LASIK eye surgery
- would only have surgery if medically necessary

“showcasing our diversity” - new avatars

Chance is defined as  the unknown and unpredictable element in happenings that seems to have no assignable cause. In the Origin of Species, Darwin's view on this topic is that those occurrences that we recognize as chance are in fact a pattern and our ignorance which makes it impossible for us to acknowledge its existence. To think that stories of evolution that exist today (in my years of education and schooling) incorporate the aspects of chance within them makes me think about the way in which science and literature are very much connected. 

While looking for an avatar, I came across a picture of our world taken from the Voyager 1 in 1990.  This picture mainly struck me because of the story that came with it.  Carl Sagan, an astronomer and astrophysicist, saw this picture and said "Look at the pale blue dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

"Under the Knife"
Intro: Paper guidelines and learning each other’s names activity: