Last night, at a Vietnamese restaurant, I had an avocado shake for dessert. On the way home I stopped at a Chinese bakery and got garlic pork cookies. Had science, like cooking, been invented more than once, what would other scientific traditions — other ways of doing science — look like? My guess is they would not include:

1. Treating results with p = 0.04 quite differently than results with p = 0.06. Use of an arbitrary dividing line (p = 0.05) makes little sense.

Until recently it was believed that the tiny stomach [that the surgery produces] is what forces the patient to eat less and lose weight. The surprise came when researchers learned that what makes surgery work so well is the cutting of some nerves in the bowel, which changes signals which flow between the gut and the brain.

The obvious connection between durian, the big smelly spiky Asian fruit, and the Shangri-La Diet is that both rely on flavor-calorie learning. We come to like the initially unpleasant smell and flavor of durian because we learn to associate it with the calories in the fruit. Here’s what happens

“To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer in based Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive.