We Dug Up Jeffrey Epstein’s Old Science Blog. It’s as Weird as You Think.

By Tom Bartlett

SEPTEMBER 1, 2019

Photo Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein

CHRONICLE ILLUSTRATION, GETTY IMAGES

Scientists who took money from and hobnobbed with Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropist and registered sex offender, have been issuing apologies and excuses in recent weeks. Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s Media Lab, called his dealings with Epstein an “error in judgment.” The Harvard biologist George Church blamed “nerd tunnel vision.” Meanwhile, more names have been added to the list of scholars who accepted invitations to the late investor’s private island or hung out at his Manhattan mansion.

What they very likely saw in Epstein — his willingness to sign sizable checks — is obvious. But was there more to it than that? And why did Epstein, who didn’t have a bachelor’s, much less a doctoral degree, seek to surround himself with biologists, mathematicians, and neuroscientists?

Each post feels like a setup for a point that never arrives.

A few clues can be found on a now-defunct website (jeffreyepsteinscience.com) that boasted the generically grandiose title Jeffrey Epstein’s Profiles in Science. The site went live in the fall of 2010, just after Epstein’s house arrest in Florida had come to an end — timing that suggests it was a calculated attempt to polish his public image. The website, which you can pull up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, was a slapdash effort, sprinkled with factual errors, typos, grammatical flubs, and passages lifted from other sites without credit. There is scant evidence here of the sparkling intellect some recipients of his financial support attributed to Epstein.

What we get instead are vague banalities. In a post titled “Why Jeffrey Epstein Supports Science,” Epstein informs the reader that science is “still a distinctly human enterprise of creative mind and thought.” In another post, he lets us know that evolutionary biology has been “fundamental to many social improvements in this century.” Elsewhere, Epstein writes that complexity is important to “understanding the fundamental processes that shape almost every aspect of human life.” Each post feels like a setup for a point that never arrives.

Sometimes the writing is merely confusing. The paragraph-long post “Cognitive Neuroscience” ends with this sentence fragment: “Yet, the way brain operations differ from computation of the type taught in computer science and electrical engineering departments.” In a post about his fondness for the writer and mathematician Martin Gardner, Epstein writes that Gardner died in both 2010 and in 1981 (the first one is correct). Here’s a sense of Epstein’s writing style: “Gardner’s numerous books and articles on recreational articles [sic] always inspired me, and I would like to share with you some fun and recreational mathematics that I have come across that are in the fun and inspirational spirit of Martin Gardner.”

An entry titled “Jeffrey Epstein on the Origami of Robert Lang” appears to have been almost entirely cribbed verbatim from Lang’s website; the only content that Epstein added is the observation that origami is “not only fun, but may provide important insights.” The post is tagged “fun stuff.”

But what the site lacked in substance, coherence, and originality, it made up for in shameless self-aggrandizement. The photo gallery consists of snapshots of scientists at Epstein-sponsored events. There is Robert Trivers, a renowned evolutionary biologist, holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres, his arm around the shoulder of Freeman Dyson. There is Marvin Minsky, the late MIT cognitive scientist and AI pioneer, saying something that made Epstein grin (one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, testified in a court deposition that she was directed to have sex with Minsky). There is Epstein in “deep discussion,” the caption insists, with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who has also since died. (The caption misspells Mandelbrot’s name.)

The gallery’s introductory text declares that the “photos that follow are indicative of Mr. Epstein’s involvement with the sciences,” just in case you missed that point.

The site’s “Testimonials” section is a compilation of nice things that important people have said about Epstein over the years. Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychologist, called Epstein “one of the most intellectual people I’ve ever met.” Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, enthused that Epstein “has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make,” while Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard, deemed him “one of the most pleasant philanthropists.” Nowak, whose research program received a $6.5-million donation from Epstein in 2003, also stated that “there are not any disadvantages to associating with him,” a curiously defensive assertion that has aged poorly.

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For the record, these recycled statements were made before Epstein’s 2008 conviction for “procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18.”

The site offers an intriguing preview of something called the Mindshift Conference, which was held at Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in January 2011. According to the description, the interdisciplinary shindig would touch on artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, new trends in theoretical physics, and a host of other highbrow topics. Among the leading lights included in the list of “confirmed attendees” are scientists from MIT and the California Institute of Technology, along with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who died this past May. Whether all of the figures on the list actually showed up for the island junket is unclear, and the promised summary of the event seems not to have been published.

Epstein’s enthusiasm for Jeffrey Epstein’s Profiles in Science must have have petered out in the months that followed. He wrote a post about forthcoming Q&As with major thinkers that would “candidly explore and discuss their responses to the challenges of their times in intimate and informal language,” but those interviews never materialized. One lengthy interview with Al Seckel, who wrote books about visual illusions and co-organized the Mindshift Conference with Epstein, was posted and later disappeared without explanation. (Seckel died in 2015.) What remained after Epstein apparently lost interest was the shell of a site featuring a dozen or so lackluster posts, a page of embarrassingly fulsome praise for a disreputable character, and not much else. Now, typing in the URL takes you to a domain-registration service.

Profiles in Science was clearly part of a broader PR strategy by Epstein to play up his financial support of science, to brag about his relationships with big-name scientists, and perhaps to create internet content that would make his crimes less prominent in search-engine results. Relatedly, The New York Times reported in July that HuffPost, Forbes, and National Review had published pieces about Epstein that amounted to little more than flattering press releases. The 2013 National Review piece, which praised him for his “passion for cutting-edge science,” was written by Christina Galbraith who, according to the Times, worked as a publicist for Epstein. All three publications have since removed those articles.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and ideas. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.

A version of this article appeared in the September 13, 2019, issue.

If you have questions or concerns about this article, please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

FACULTY LIFE

Tom Bartlett

https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-dug-up-jeffrey-epsteins-old-science-blog-its-as-weird-as-you-think/

Thank you @darkknight111

Who are the Knights of Pythias and what is the Story of Pythias?

Epstein, Schumer, Schiff, Weiner, Byrd, Emanuels...and Seth Rich?

@mercurysball2 @ababcb @barbarastreisand @ordotempliinternetis

"NAME DROPPY" THE ILLUSIONIST

Al Seckel has left the country. But the world’s greatest collector of optical illusions left some troubles behind.

By Mark Oppenheimer | July 20, 2015 •

For a 30-year stretch beginning in the early 1980s, one of Los Angeles County’s great hosts was a man called Al Seckel. His parties were not lavish or wild. There was no skinny-dipping, no drugs. There were no ice sculptures, no celebrity caterers, no peacocks strutting about the grounds. There weren’t even grounds, really. From the time he moved to L.A. in 1981 until he left for France about five years ago, Seckel held court in a series of apartments and rental homes, often in the hills of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, save for a stint or two in Malibu. Sometimes his parties were arranged around a main event—Fourth of July fireworks, a magic show. Other times he issued instructions, like “Bring the most interesting person you’ve ever met,” or “Bring a copy of the book that you’ve most enjoyed.” Sometimes Seckel had a wife to co-host with him, other times not. One wife had been an It Girl in London during the 1980s; another, his current wife, had been a co-founder of the early web search engine Magellan.

As in wives, so in party guests: Seckel’s unique genius was his catholicity of taste. Milling around his parties were not only the B- and C-list celebrities requisite in L.A. but Nobel Prize-winning physicists, MacArthur “genius prize” winners, tech entrepreneurs, oddball futurists, and magicians. There were actors, musicians, and fringe entertainment types, plus academics associated with nearby Caltech and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Catherine Mohr, a noted innovator in surgical robotics and a longtime friend of Seckel’s, met the Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Francis Crick at Seckel’s parties. “He loves bringing together people of interesting backgrounds and seeing the chemistry of them,” Mohr told me.

John Edwards, a retired Air Force engineer who danced in two Michael Jackson videos and won $100,000 on a short-lived ABC show called Dance Machine, first met Seckel through a Southern California atheists’ group, and for a time the two were close friends. Edwards remembers meeting, at Seckel’s parties, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, drone pioneer Paul MacCready, magician and MacArthur Fellow James “Amazing” Randi, and Dudley Moore. “He would bring everyone together the way Hearst would bring people to his castle,” Edwards said. One of the biggest names he met through Seckel was physicist Richard Feynman. Edwards had dinner with Feynman at Seckel’s house, met the two of them for lunch at Caltech, and even went camping with them.

Seckel’s allure was partly his background: People around him understood that he had ties to Caltech, and that at Cornell he had been a teaching assistant in Carl Sagan’s class. But his pedigree did not fully explain his allure, his Death Star tractor-beam pull. I met Seckel once, in 2000, when I interviewed him for a piece on atheist history. He greeted me at the door of the house he was renting in La Cañada, gathered me inside with his arm over my shoulder, and, before I could say a word, guided me toward a painting of an optical illusion, the appearance of which shifted as I approached. He told me that that he was one of the world’s great collectors of optical illusions, that he’d earned a great deal of money in rare books, and that he’d been helping a promising young pop star get a good manager. He was gregarious and loquacious and name-droppy. Seckel gave me the sense that his life was a grand narrative in which I was privileged to have a walk-on part.

https://archive.is/jqJB3#selection-144.1-289.970

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Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Alexander Djerassi.

He’s the son of Ghislaine’s sister Isabel Maxwell. Isabel was a technology pioneer. She also dabbled in film and the arts. Maxwell worked with Djerassi Films Inc. on collaborative projects with Dale Djerassi whom she married in 1984 (and here’s an interesting extra tidbit – Dale Djerassi’s father is the scientist who invented the birth control pill).

https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/07/clinton-alexander-djerassi-ghislane-maxwell-nephew-state-dept/

Jeffrey Epstein ‘Friend’ Ghislaine Maxwell Has More Skeletons in Her Family Closet Than a House of Horrors

Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, comes from a family by turns brilliant and accomplished, deceptive and doomed. Her backstory is full of sex and science, money and magical illusions. And today she is the world’s most wanted woman—at least by the media and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

As we looked for her in France in recent days, she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. But we did discover enough skeletons in the family closet (including those of her in-laws and their families) to fill a house of horrors.

We searched near her dead mother’s estate east of here—and even at the bottom of a cliff in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a few hours from Meyreuil, where her brother-in-law Al Seckel, giver of TED talks on optical illusions, reportedly fell to his death in 2015 after he was exposed as a swindler in Los Angeles.

We also looked at the family tree of her other brother-in-law, an American astrophysicist whose genius rocket scientist father Frank Malina at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California pioneered what would become NASA before he fled to France with J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men on his heels.

Curiously, Isabel followed in the family tradition of filing for bankruptcy in December 2015 despite having been a multi-millionaire. That move may have been related to the untimely demise at age 56 of her third husband, the infamous con man Al Seckel who, she later found out, was not legally her husband since he was still married to his first wife. In 2015, when he reportedly died, he was potentially on the hook for millions.

Seckel was the subject of an extraordinary 5,000-word investigation earlier that same year by The Tablet’s Mark Oppenheimer that laid bare decades of a convoluted and litigious life as the “world’s greatest collector of optical illusions.”

Seckel, the son of a refugee from the Nazis, moved to L.A. and used his wile and charm to pass himself off as an Ivy League graduate and double doctoral candidate at Caltech.

Soon, Seckel zeroed in on the movers and shakers. “An age before Silicon Valley had captured the geek imagination,” Oppenheimer wrote, “Caltech and the surrounding aerospace industry was the frontier of nerd power and glory.”

Seckel befriended and bewitched the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann among other neuroscientists, as well as academics and even magicians like James Randi.

Seckel then used those contacts to sell rare books to prestigious customers who were often hoodwinked out of thousands in bad deals. He moved on to co-opt the burgeoning field of optical illusion, popularizing the art of manipulating images by using research from others in books he wrote.

(His daughter, Elizabeth Seckel, has built on her father’s work in optical illusion by pioneering something called “mirror box therapy.” Seckel brought her method, sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, to Haiti after the earthquake in 2012 to help recent amputees with their phantom limb pain.)

In 2010, Seckel hosted a scientific conference on Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous private island with Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow, who was Stephen Hawking’s co-author, and MIT’s Gerald Sussman.

Oppenheimer told The Daily Beast this week that there was “no evidence” that Seckel or any of the scientists at the island party were involved in any sexual activity with young girls.

In 2004 Seckel gave a TED talk that’s been viewed almost 2.5 million times about “perceptual illusions that fool our brains.”

Because of Seckel’s shady past, it was not surprising that vague reports of his death—a perceptual illusion perhaps?—began popping up just weeks after Oppenheimer’s July 2015 story exposed him to hordes of creditors.

A paid obituary was published on Legacy.com, supposedly after appearing in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, but it does not appear on the paper’s website. One report has circulated around various Seckel-obsessed corners of the internet that his body was found at the bottom of a cliff near the home in France where he had moved with Isabel.

But The Daily Beast could not locate any officials in the town where Seckel was last known to live who had any report of his death. Oppenheimer and others said they have not yet found proof, either. The Daily Beast was unable to reach Isabel Maxwell or Elizabeth Secker for comment.

Continue reading: https://storageunit.home.blog/2019/12/10/jeffrey-epstein-friend-ghislaine-maxwell-has-more-skeletons-in-her-family-closet-than-a-house-of-horrors/ https://storageunit.home.blog/tag/al-seckel/

AL SECKEL 1958 - 2015

Al Paul Seckel, who died at the age of 57 near his home in France, is best known for helping to make optical illusions a household name throughout the world.

Al Seckel was born in New York City on September 3rd, 1958 to Paul Seckel and Ruth Schonthal Seckel. Al had two older brothers, Ben and Bernard Seckel. They grew up in New Rochelle, New York. While attending Cornell University he met his first wife, Laura Seckel. They moved to California where he spent a great deal of time with Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 1987 their daughter, Elizabeth, was born.

Throughout the 1980s, Al Seckel was extremely active in the freethought movement. In 1983, he and John Edwards created the Darwin fish design, which was first sold as a bumper sticker and on T-shirts. In 1984, he founded the Southern California Skeptics (SCS), and became a spokesperson for science and its relationship to the paranormal. SCS co-sponsored and produced a monthly series of lectures held at Caltech that explained alleged paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception and firewalking, the aim of which was to interest people in the study of science. Al also authored a monthly column in the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Monica News where he wrote about investigating other supernatural claims from a scientific perspective.

In 1987, SCS and Seckel helped sponsor an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme court in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, challenging the constitutionality of a Louisiana law calling for the classroom inclusion of creation science. After retiring from the skeptics’ movement in 1990, he turned his full attention to studying the human brain, specifically vision and how it relates to perception.

Al Seckel launched the first free interactive website on illusions in 1994, which can now be found at http:// tinyurl .com/alseckelsillusions . Academics, researchers, and students from around the world found his website to be an immense and positive contribution to their teaching and understanding of the subject matter. Throughout much of the nineties, this site was the only source for this information.

He went on to write a number of award-winning books on visual illusions, such as The Art of Optical Illusions and Masters of Deception. He also gave invited lectures at universities and conferences around the world, including at TED and the World Economic Forum, Davos.

Passionate about igniting imagination and joy of scientific thought and curiosity in others, Al developed optical illusion installations and exhibits for museums around the world, including the London Museum of Science, the Hong Kong Centre, the Singapore Science Centre, the Calgary Science Center, and the National Science Centre, Malaysia. He also consulted for many of the most famous magicians of the time, including David Copperfield, Franz Harary, and Mark Setteducati.

Al will be remembered and greatly missed by close friends and colleagues for his gatherings of great thinkers that were akin to the salons during the Age of Enlightenment: carefully curated groups of scientists, artists, writers, and innovators from all walks of life who would gather and share ideas with people from spheres they would otherwise never have met.

Al always had a passion for delightful creations of the mind, which included impossible objects, origami, mazes, creative toys, magic, and mathematical puzzles, as well as a deep fascination with the history of scientific thought. Whether in France hunting for Neanderthal tools, exploring crystal caves and chateaux, or back in America camping and river rafting with friends and family, getting lost in a maze, or delighting a room with impossible magic you had to see to believe, he was always full of life and laughter, ever having fun and adventure.

Al is survived by his daughter, Elizabeth, his brother, Bernard, and his partner, Isabel.

Donations may be made in memoriam to the American Heart Association.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150923085738/http://www.alseckel.net/

Undercover Scientist Spoils Epstein Island Trap

A trap to mislead investigators

Reichart Von Wolfsheild was a software architect. He was invited to the conference, along with Murray Gell-Mann and Frances Arnold, both Nobel laureates. Some of the top minds in the world were there. The whole thing was a trap put together to tease investigators to launch a premature raid and get disgraced in the process, making them go away for good.

It was put together by Al Seckel, described by DailyMail as “a shady ‘sensory illusionist’ who was bigamously married to Isabel Maxwell — sister of Epstein’s long-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.” The way Von Wolfsheild describes him, “About half of what Al told you was made up in his head and the other half was true. But you never knew which was which.”

Since he knew that Edwards was trying to link Epstein to underage girls, because he was the one who developed the software Edwards was using to store his sensitive Epstein files on, the engineer offered to accept the invitation, and go as an undercover mole. It’s a good thing he did. It turns out that Epstein was trying to set Edwards up.

Older than they seemed

During the conference, three women were present who “appeared to be in their mid-teens, up to 10 years younger than they really were.” It was clear that Epstein rounded up women who appeared to be much younger than they really were, hoping they would be seen and prompt a raid. After that, he could claim righteous indignation. If all went well, everyone would go away and leave him alone.

https://patriotnationpress.com/undercover-scientist-spoils-epstein-island-trap/

It was all put together by Al Seckel, a shady 'sensory illusionist' who was bigamously married to Isabel Maxwell (pictured together ini 2008) — sister of Epstein's long-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who helped him procure underage girls to massage him

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8181221/Jeffrey-Epstein-tried-lay-trap-deliberately-hiring-women-20s-appeared-younger.html

AS site : https://web.archive.org/web/20150923085738/http://www.alseckel.net/

I have given invited lectures on illusions and perception at many of the world's leading universities, including Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, UCI, USCD, and internationally at the University of Cambridge, Oxford University, University of London, University of Rome, University of Lund, University of Utrecht, University of Bristol, and so on. I was an invited speaker at the 100th birthday celebrations of the birth of the noted graphic artist M.C. Escher in Italy and have been a frequent lecturer at the Gatherings for Martin Gardner held in Atlanta, GA.

I am an invited participant in John Brockman's Third Culture group, which is a think tank featuring accomplished thinkers and achievers, who speak out publically on a variety of issues. Please visit this highly interesting web site edge.org

I also give general popular lectures to teacher and school groups. If you are interested in booking a lecture, please contact me at the e-mail below.

I am also involved in mentorship programs with academically gifted students with the Institute for Educational Advancement. To learn about my mentorship program here, please click on this link. http://www.educationaladvancement.org/programs/students/apprenticeship/schedules.php

I am extensively collecting, researching, and experimenting with illusions to understand what conditions are necessary for them to work. Illusions can provide a wonderful window into how the brain works by revealing hidden underlying mechanisms in a way that normal perception fails to do. I am particularly interested in understanding the neuronal correlates of visual and other types of sensory illusions, that is, how they can be explained in terms of the electrophysiology and neuroanatomy of the retinal and cortical networks that mediate visual perception. I have specialized in the following areas:

Brightness Perception

Recovery of 3D from 2D

Size and Distance Perception

Cross-Modal Illusions

I am also interested in mental spatial imagery and looking for patients who have this particular deficit. I am doing this research in conjunction with my colleagues in Stephen Kosslyn's laboratory at Harvard University. I officially stopped my long-term affiliation with the Shimojo and Koch laboratories at the California Institute of Technology in 2005 to pursue my own independent research and book writing activities.

A number of years ago, I put up a massive and revolutionary interactive web site on illusions and perception, which I have been forced to temporarily take down. First of all, it turned out to be so popular that it was costing me thousands of dollars for excess bandwidth usage. Secondly, I felt the site was in need of a tremendous overhaul, which I am currently in the process of doing. Thirdly, there were large numbers of people downloading both ideas and images, and reposting them all over the web without acknowledgement or credit. I hope to have the revamped site back up soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to visit another great site devoted to optical illusions at http://www.eyetricks.com .

Contact Information

E-mail is the best way to reach me: [email protected]

If you are interested in licensing optical illusions, please visit the most comprehensive collection of optical illusions on the Internet at IllusionLicensing.com.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080730132728/http://www.illusionworks.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20050601033335/http://www.eyetricks.com/

His Illusions site (WEIRD EXCERPT "funny pictures" CP? or nothing?):

Funny Pictures on the Internet

If you are looking to kill some time and get a good laugh, check out the entertainment that funny pictures have to offer.

Funny pictures are available virtually everywhere, but most prevalently on the internet. There are three basic outlets you can view funny pictures, One is the internet, the second place is through the tv, and the final place is through a paper manufactured good such as a magazine or newspaper. All three contain funny pictures, and all have pros and cons about viewing the pictures, but in the end you receive a laugh through either of the three methods.

The first method to view funny pictures is through the internet. There are thousands upon thousands of websites that host funny pictures, and the most common method used to key in on set websites is through a search in a search engine. Typing in funny pictures will produce many websites offering a host of funny pictures for you to view and get a laugh out of. The only thing you need to look out for when viewing funny pictures online is the mislabeling of websites and getting dragged into the wrong thing. Some websites will request information from you in order to view more pictures, such as email and credit card information. It is always best to avoid those types of websites and back out as soon as possible.

The second method of viewing funny pictures is through the tv. There are several television series that have funny moments, and in those side moments are funny pictures to fill the time. Most comedy shows will have a series or two that incorporates funny pictures into their comedy routine, so do a little searching around into which programs those are.

The third and most time told method of viewing funny pictures is through a paper good. There are several magazines that lay host to funny pictures as a way to sell more copies of their magazine, and there are several magazines that run only funny pictures. Aside from magazines the funny papers in the daily newspaper columns also have funny pictures for viewing. There are also several books that contain funny pictures, the only negative of paper good viewing of funny pictures is you sometimes have to pay to purchase the item that contains the pictures.

Overall if you are looking to get a good laugh out of your day, check out what the internet, television, and paper goods have to offer in the field of funny pictures.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180109062621/http://www.illusionworks.com/funny-pictures.html

https://web.archive.org/web/19990210065835/http://www.illusionworks.com/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20200118031257/https://www.illusionworks.com/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20110929130748/http://www.illusionworks.com/scary-optical.html#

https://web.archive.org/web/20080730132728/http://www.illusionworks.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20060127211146/http://psylux.psych.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/introductory_level.html