Adventures of a Discoverer

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go through a trip through Brazilian History: I visited the Itaú Cultural Institute . First, some context: Itaú Bank is the largest bank in Latin America, headquartered in São Paulo. For many years it had a banker by the name of Olavo Setúbal as its chairman, and, in addition to administering the bank, he painstakingly collected a number of rare artifacts from the beginnings of Brazilian History (as in, when Europeans first arrived in the country, all the way back to the XVI century) and once he passed away a museum was built to show to the public all those artifacts. It's quite an extraordinary collection: it contains original drawings made by the first artists who visited Brazil, throughout the XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. To Europeans, Brazil was a big unknown land, full of strange creatures and unimaginable places. For the sake of comparison, the Europeans that looked at those drawings felt kinda like us when we see pictures of Mar...

Yesterday I spent a day doing explorations at my Alma Mater, Unicamp ("Universidade Estadual de Campinas" - State University of Campinas), in Brazil. For those who already know about it, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs. For the others, you may learn your piece of Brazilian trivia today! Back in 1966, Brazil was living under a military dictatorship, where Army generals would be nominated President (there is a whole lot more to this story, but that would require a whole lot more writing...). At the time, the military had decided that Brazil must become an industrial powerhouse, and as such they were attracting foreign companies to build plants in the country. As part of that effort, they knew that they needed more engineers, mathematicians, physicists, etc... in other words, more universities. It just so happens that at that time a visionary professor of medicine (Prof. Zeferino Vaz) had this crazy idea of creating a brand new university in the location of an old mass...

This last Monday I had the chance of hiking the Noble Knob trail, which was quite a noteworthy hike for a number of reasons. First, some details: this trail is just outside the Mount Rainier National Park boundaries, in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, and it's one of the highest trails outside of the National Park (which gives you amazing views of Mount Rainier). I was lucky that it was a wonderful day, sunny and cool, and I had amazing views throughout the trail. Another interesting detail about this hike is that, unfortunately, this part of the National Forest had a forest fire recently: you could clearly see where the forest burned and where the fire stopped. This made for a hike like no other I made before, mixing stretches of burned forest with still intact forest. Getting to the trailhead was already part of the adventure. You have to take a forest road that under normal circumstances is already pretty challenging: unpaved, narrow, and with no guard rails next to st...