The Unapologetic Mathematician

Tomorrow night, Paul Oakenfold, Hybrid, and Liquid Todd all come to DJ up in New Orleans. All for $20. As the kids (used to) say: “w00t”.

Hybrid is actually a band of some repute, but they’ll be spinning tomorrow. Oakenfold and Liquid Todd are both extremely well-known DJs, at least as such things go. Unlike in the rock/pop paradigm that so dominates American music, the focus for electronic and dance music is hardly ever on the guy playing the music. It’s out on the floor, on the crowd having fun. And so the guy up in the DJ booth gets a reputation for picking good music, and the bands get a reputation for producing good music, but there’s much less of the cult-of-personality effect than in rock or pop. And still, Paul Oakenfold has risen to the top.

Oakenfold recently started producing his own music from scratch. I think he blew through what he had to offer on the first album, as the second one wasn’t much to write home about. Still, there were some really interesting things on that first one. From 2002’s Bunkka, and with vocals provided by Shifty Shellshock, “Starry Eyed Surprise”.

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HBO has been showing V for Vendetta, which reminds me of a story.

Five years into the century, a terrorist plot was foiled. A tip-off to the government led to the arrest of a man who was planning to blow up the legislature. He was found with bomb-making materials in his posession, he was using a false identification, and he was a member of a marginalized religious group. He was taken to the government’s most secure detention facility and there was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, as it’s fashionable to say. Of course, torture was strictly illegal, except when the executive authority deemed it expedient.

Anyhow, under such questioning this man gave a list of names of his supposed co-conspirators. All of them pled innocence, and all were swiftly found guilty — some on the say-so of a tortured man — and the lot of them were put to death. Whether the list of names was accurate or not was never much questioned. Also executed was a religious advisor who actually had urged against the plot, but who was caught up in a fervor against the members of his religion. The tide of public opinion swung violently against that group, despite the majority who would have condemned the plot and wanted nothing to do with such extremes.

It sounds eerily contemporary, and yet it happened 400 years ago in England, on the fifth of November, 1605, when Guy Fawkes was apprehended before his attempt to detonate barrels of gunpowder secreted below the Houses of Parliament. The popular rhyme urges us to remember the day, but as with most history the details are quickly forgotten. And, true to form, those who have forgotten the history may repeat it yet.