In the course of writing about Drakes Bay Oyster Company (DBOC) I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Dr. Corey Goodman, and have picked up one of his sayings: “Facts are our friends.”

An inconvenient fact might wreck your theory or your dissertation, but it should still be welcomed. Science is an ongoing process of forming hypotheses, testing them, getting results and analyzing them. Scientists make their data and methods available to the scientific…