Offside
Limelight

Andreia Passos, Ricardo Bessa and Carlos Pinho

Free Nonsense

"(...) and not everyone is lucky enough to start their professional career at INESC Porto, a place with a wonderful work environment and nice people who worry about making sure that everyone’s integration is easy and smooth", Pedro Castanheira

Gallery of the Uncommon

"And now we have discovered something amazing: the famous University of Aveiro used a text included in a 2004 edition of BIP on the project Pêndulo, developed by USIC, as model text in Portuguese language test for University applicants over 23 years of age!"

Have your say

"I am encouraged by the opportunity to contribute to the establishment of a Brazilian company, temporarily called INESC P&D Brasil, which will follow the same philosophy of combining scientific and technological values (...)", Alexandre Rocco

Jobs 4 the Boys & Girls

In this section, the reader may find reference to public announcements made by INESC Porto offering grants, contracts and other opportunities of the same kind.

Biptoon

More scenes of how life goes merrily on...

 
 

Trivializing the impossible

Trivializing the impossible

Without excess of revelry, the contest “seven wonders of Portuguese origin in the World” has ended recently. Pro memoria, here are the results of the online popular vote:

- Fortress of Diu, India

- Fortress of Mazagão, Morocco

- Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, India

- Old City of Santiago, Cape Verde

- Saint Paul’s Church in Macao, China

- Convent of São Francisco de Assis da Penitência in Ouro Preto, Brazil

- Convent São Francisco e Ordem Terceira in Salvador, Brazil

These are magnificent choices. And if, in some cases, some public discontent has been voiced about this contest, we cannot help but think that it results, in fact, from one of the wounds we inherited from the Salazarian dictatorship: some of us still today despise and reject our own history for the regime had abused it immensely.

We must thus do more than merely contemplate: the monument that fascinates us the most is the Fort of Príncipe da Beira, in Rondónia, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. Even though nominated, this surprising monument was not one of the winners, perhaps due to its more than secluded location, far from the paths of tourism and public mention.

Remarkable: 1 kilometer in perimeter, 60 meter high walls. Unlikely: located in the middle of the Amazon jungle, near the banks of the Guaporé River; even today, if you need to go there, you must really want to go there. Tragic: so many people died building the Fort only for it to become an abandoned prison for the hopeless and doomed. And epic: built in the 18th century and later lost and forsaken, the Fort was rediscovered in 1906 by General Rondon. One can only wonder what he felt when, emerging from the jungle, he came face to face with such massive gargantuan structure.

Above all, the Fort of Príncipe da Beira may symbolize the illuminated dementia of boundless delusions. Yet if the Portuguese are capable, today as 900 years ago, of the best and the worst, then let us then choose this Fort as the embodiment of our capacity to excel: the ambition of becoming more, of going further taking any boundaries, of preferring what is splendid and mighty over the meager profitable and safe, of assuming the resolutely fearless and dauntless act of trivializing the impossible.

Let us be such. No one is better at it than we are.