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I can recommend Frans de Waals' latest book "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?". It's an easy read that gives you an overview of the kind of animal intelligence research that is being done and how it evolved over time. It covers a wide variety of species, not only primates.

It's a reasonable reflex to look for intelligence in animals that are closest to us. But I think I can relate with what you are saying. Although it makes sense in the historical scheme of things, we are generally still convinced that humans are superior to animals. While that might be true for some cases, there is a lot of research that has shown us that animals, not only primates, can surpass us when it comes to specific cognitive tasks. We're probably the best all rounders intelligence wise, but we're definitely not the best in absolute terms. The title of de Waals book encapsulates exactly that and much more, but you'll have to read it to figure that out ;)

I've heard some people claim that it's not necessarily the brain/body size ratio that determines intelligence, but the ability to manipulate the world around you. An octopus has 8 appendages, a dolphin has none (maybe its snout and tail could count as two, but are not nearly as efficient as an octupus's arm).

I've never seen any research that backs this up, but I'd love to read some more about these claims. If anyone cares to elaborate?

And you'd be surprised about how little we know about animal intelligence. You should look into the psychology professor Irene Pepperberg and her parrot Alex (Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg). Fascinating.

cromwellian, you are not alone in this. I have been using CDNs for years and now, all of a sudden, they are deemed the root of all evil? I get it though, digital fingerprinting, heartbleed attacks, superfish, those are some serious privacy issues. But this blogpost? It feels like the whole debate about not implementing socialism because it allows for a small percentage of people to abuse the system. What about the amount of energy saved by using a CDN, the decrease in latency, the browser support? Doesn't that count for anything?

This is a serious question: What damage does Google Fonts do to the users visiting my website using these CDNs and does it outweigh the benefits? Why should I take this "Hey, CDNs can deliver JS and therefor are able serve customized code, which theoretically means they are spying on us" seriously?

More and more am I starting to believe this privacy thing is turning into mass hysteria and it's being cleverly spinned by some organizations in order to gain traction. Maybe am I missing the point and if so, please, enlighten me.