Godel's theorems and Oliver Stone

Two audio suggestions to take your mind off the financial crisis -- at least until Asian markets open on Sunday :-)

An excellent 40 minute discussion of Godel's incompleteness theorems with two mathematicians (one a logician) and a theoretical physicist. If you know a bit about the subject the first 15 minutes or so are quite slow, but the last 20 minutes are well worth listening to. One of the discussants notes that the axioms of Euclidean geometry are not rich enough to be self-referential (unlike those of arithmetic), hence do not suffer from incompleteness. (Geometry is axiomatizable but not adequate to encode the syntax of proofs.)

Leonard Lopate interview (30 min) with Oliver Stone. Stone directed Wall Street, one of my favorite movies. (Too bad he's not doing the sequel Money Never Sleeps.) Few people know he was a classmate of George W. Bush's at Yale. The contrast could not be greater: Stone volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam, was wounded twice and won the Bronze heart and Purple Star. He also wrote the screenplays for Midnight Express (for which he won an Oscar) and Scarface ("say hello to my little friend!" :-). Stone's biopic of Bush, W, was done in collaboration with Stanley Weiser, his co-writer from Wall Street, and will open next week. At one point in the interview Stone comments that he doubts Greenspan, Paulson or any of the other leaders really understands what is happening in this crisis, due to the complexities of derivatives.