history
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Sugar exports
Although it may not seem so, there are central themes that present themselves each month in the making of this blog’s posts. Elections aside, this month the theme is ancestry. I thought the best way to begin this theme would be to review an article to which I was able to contribute in the collection…
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Public policies
Have you ever stopped to think that your daily life is shaped, all the time, by decisions you did not make? The bus that arrives on time, the vaccine that reaches the health center, the school that opens its doors, the storm alert that arrives on your phone. None of this happens by chance. All…
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The editing of reality
We are in 2026, another election year in Brazil. And, as happens with every election, we have already begun to see circulating on social networks and in family groups those messages that mix truth, half-truth, and invention. Edited videos, cut audio, suppressed contexts. None of this is new. What is new, perhaps, is the speed…
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Systems and Libraries
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to find a specific item in a library that holds over 184 million items? I’m not talking about finding a book on a shelf. I’m talking about finding something in one of the largest documentary collections in the world. The existence of a…
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An embroidered system
Let’s do a small exercise. Imagine cross-stitch as an analog computational system, not because embroidery is literally a computer, but because some of its characteristics allow us to build a curiously precise analogy between a manual practice and certain principles that we now associate with computing. Let’s begin with the simplest structure. The fabric works…
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Embroidery: the oldest in the world
The history of embroidery is older than any written memory. Among the stitches still used today, cross-stitch is often pointed out as one of the oldest techniques. But even before fabrics existed, early humans were already joining hides and leathers with natural fiber threads. Needles were made of bone, some up to 30,000 years old,…