Another beautiful day, albeit on a different continent from when we last spoke. Jetlag and coffee, and now I'm on a train heading for the lovely island where our meeting will take place. It does seem strange to travel halfway around the world to gather with the folks who gathered only a few weeks ago (and also halfway round the other way), but I'm not complaining - great locations and great science with fun people. I wouldn't have it any other way (okay, maybe without the jetlag). But that isn't what we were talking about. We were ruminating on big science and little science, how we justify each and how they are both little, and both big. But the challenge we left off with is how to inform those who make the policy decisions (and by 'policy', I mean 'money') as to the justification for what we think of as little science, which so often seems to fall prey to the dictum that science should be 'big'. But, I argued, little is big - the issue is only one of serial versus parallel processing and the advantages of each.
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