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Introduction
LOOKING AT THIS BOOK,
THIS FRANCISCAN
MISSIONARY OF SCIENCE
How do you write a book? I wrote each essay in this book enjoying myself, enjoying my study of the
subject matter I wasn’t familiar with – in other words, enjoying the challenge of writing about something I
knew little about and, on top of that, that which overall is a boring subject: science. How can I enjoy
working with boring materials? Creativity. I get information and ideas from here or there, from him or her, often
from books, not the least from the Internet, and relate them to the science, and the results you can see here. In
creativity, relating is everything; in fact, everything is related – but you have to look for that relationship yourself.
And there the joy of creativity lies, in looking for relationships where there don’t seem to be any. Writing is inventing.
The writing that I love is daring to invent.
Before this, I had learned to publish in the Internet, that is, to blog, my first blog being uploaded in 2002 in a
website I called iNNOViSiON. I learned to like blogging so much I now have 50 websites / blogsites – you can visit
http://frankahilario.com/ and be sure to count the list under ‘Blogroll’ and click if you like on any entry in the long
list. Exuberance can do that to you.
I have learned to do HTML coding myself and found a shortcut to (almost) HTML everything: Google Docs. So my
blogs are formatted as if you were reading them in Microsoft Word 2003 (my favorite): italics, bold, underline,
indented, tabbed, tabled, heading-leveled, the works. Thank God for Google Docs.
So, hundreds of blogs later – many of them being long essays, not simply journal entries like ‘I woke up with a
headache today, but I smiled at myself in the mirror anyway’ – I have learned to think of 1,000-word essays and
control my number of words, writing fast and furious and with feeling. Many of the essays in this book are 1,000-
word having been born and grown up within their own 24 wonderful hours. The pressure becomes pleasure and
it’s all mine, entirely mine. That’s called attitude. (I’m sorry I can’t teach you attitude – you have to do it yourself.)
Introduction