David Foster Wallace’s entry into the Atlantic Monthly’s series of writers’ thoughts on the “American Idea”:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

I, for one, am willing to sacrifice my personal safety to protect the ideals that seem so elusive to us. I’ve expressed this thought to several people, over the years, and the response has often been vehemently negative. The problem, I think, was the technocratic manner in which I presented the thought. I’d describe ongoing terrorist attacks as the “operating cost” of an open society or a “tax” that we pay for being a global market player. “You’re trivializing the deaths of thousands,” they’d say.

I think DFW puts it better. His full piece (only a few paragraphs more) is after the jump.

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I remember being so excited when I first found out about Wikipedia by the idea that I could add all of my copious bits of knowledge to it, making it better. That feeling lasted for about an hour, before I realized that there really wasn’t much that I knew that the lazyweb didn’t already know, usually with much more depth that I did.

Today, though I was able to add a little bit of my brain to the mix. I was looking at this guy’s weird contraption for tracing out parabolic volumes (for large solar cookers), but I had a little trouble figuring out why it worked.

Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on parabolas was no help. Once I figured it out, though, I was able to make a minor adjustment to one of the diagrams there and add it. A good feeling ensued.

Details: The Instructable works on a weird mechanical contraption that relies on the principle illustrated in the diagram that I added:

“Parabolic curve showing arbitrary line (L), focus (F), and vertex (V). L is an arbitrary line perpendicular to the axis of symmetry and opposite the focus of the parabola from the vertex (i.e. farther from V than from F.) The length of any line F - Pn - Qn is the same. This is similar to saying that a parabola is an ellipse, but with one focal point at infinity.”

The wording is a little unwieldy; feel free to tighten it up!