Adventures of a Discoverer

A number of major cities around the world have created a similar tourist attraction, that has proven to be quite popular: a glass cube, made of reinforced glass, that sticks out of the side of a major skyscraper. I'm spending some time in São Paulo, which has its own version of this attraction, and I had the opportunity to try it out. In a major skyscraper close to the city center there is Sampa Sky : on the 42nd floor, four glass cubes stick out of the sides of the building giving an incredible view of the massive city of São Paulo (the eighth largest in the world, with 21 million people in the metro area - and also where I was born). I'm not going to lie: I had an intense feeling of vertigo when I stepped in the first cube. It requires some courage to go all the way forward and touch the front glass. After some time you overcome your fear, that is, until you look down and back at the building and you have the impression that you are not on the side that you should be in a sk...

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...