blow my mind, twice |
21 July 2004 - 2:24 pm |
my mind gets blown twice today
first, reading this paragraph written by stephen hawking on the subject of what happens to matter that gets sucked into a black hole, and why:
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost.i feel like i could almost understand this, if i knew what the following meant:
- topologically trivial
- time slicing
- unitary
- analytically continued
- Lorentzian
- asymptotically independent
second, i got my letter on my foreign service written exam results today, and i passed. (and there was much rejoicing. yay.)
this is mind-blowing in a little way and a big way. the little way is that i'm now going to have to schedule, and actually take, the all-day oral assessment sometime in the next months (between sept and may, apparently). this is a big deal because the orals are an exhausting all-day interview with 3 parts, all under the gaze of state department "assessors," and state doesn't even tell you exactly what they're looking for.
it's mind-blowing in a big way when i think about what happens if i actually get offered a job (not likely, at least this time around, since it's the rare applicant who passes orals on their first try). conceivably, if i took the orals as soon as i could, i could get offered a place in the a-100 (training) class that starts next summer. i'm not going to take the orals asap, for just that reason, though. i do want to finish my degree, and that wouldn't be possible if i started the foreign service next summer.
also, and this is probably ridiculous to those of you who aren't nearly 30 and still in school, but a foreign service job would be the first "real" job i've ever had, and certainly the first *career*. me? with a career? seriously? i've been a student for so (damn) long that being anything else doesn't fit very well into my view of myself.
then there's the enormous issue of whether karl would even *want* to follow me around the world--i doubt most significant others would, and i don't think i blame them, though i myself would be giddily ecstatic with the idea of being able to travel the world as part of my spouse's career. we get to live in X country, he has to work, and i get to explore? sounds just about perfect.
and what about miss fergusson? she's 6 1/2 now, and who knows how much longer she'll live. but she's healthy and i hope she stays that way for years to come, and i have NO IDEA how easy it is to take pets around the world like that (though in theory it shouldn't be an issue for countries that aren't rabies-free). plus, i'm guessing that vet care in places like namibia is, um, less than state-of-the-art.
but i'm getting WAAAAY ahead of myself here. first, i need to schedule an appointment for the orals.