John Law of CRESC and Open University gave the penultimate talk in the STS groups’ series on scale, with the title ‘Fishy Parables’. Law used data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a Scandinavian salmon farm to illustrate the difference between what Chunglin Kwa terms ‘romantic’ and ‘baroque’ modes of understanding complexity (including issues of size and scale). This difference, Law argued, allows us to understand and counter the dominance of certain styles of thought.