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Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis.

Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.

There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.

Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.

Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.

But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

“We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice.

“Where’s here? Can you see?”

“Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart.”

Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’Sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)

Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).

Science wasn’t a show-business talent, conducted in large halls and decided by audience applause.

His sin was something that scientists had done for thousands of years. Scientists didn’t usually change data, not unless they were outright charlatans. But when facts didn’t agree with theory, there was an awful temptation to find reasons for rejecting the offending data and and hanging on to the theory. Ptolemy had done it. Newton had done it. Darwin had done it. Einstein had done so explicitly.

Birdie cringed. If there was one thing worse than being a coward, it was being mistaken for a hero.

Human history extends for approximately ten thousand years before the Expansion, with written records available for roughly half that time. Unfortunately, the human tendency for self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, and baseless faith in human superiority over all other intelligent life-forms renders much of the written record unreliable. Serious research workers are advised to seek alternative primary data sources concerning humans. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)

That’s what logic says. But I say, phooey, who wants logic? Not you, and not me. We want results.