Complex Numbers

Crow-Magnon

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45968935

Humans like to restrict what they eat.

I'm not just talking about dieting to lose weight. I mean, like, kosher or halal, or vegan or vegetarian or pescatarian or lacto-ovo-whateverthefuck. Or sticking to organic only, or "natural" only (that rant is for another time). It's as if they have too many choices and have to narrow them down to stay relatively sane, or maybe just to maintain group identity.

I don't like to limit myself, though I'm not the adventurous type who tries disgusting foods from other cultures. My own culture's disgusting food is good enough for me. Offer me some balut in the Philippines, and I'll politely decline. That rotten fish thing they eat in Norway? Nope. But other than the very subjective "don't eat disgusting food" restriction, I have developed one simple rule about eating:

I refuse to eat anything that's smarter than I am.

Now, not to brag or anything, but I'm incredibly smart. Okay, I'm bragging, fine. Point is, I'm smarter than the vast majority of humans. (That doesn't mean I'll eat them, though. Probably.) But after seeing how cuttlefish act and organize themselves in the ocean, I decided they're smarter than I am. So, no cuttlefish. Well, it's not like there are a lot of places that serve cuttlefish, but chances are that calamari in the Italian place down the street is actually cuttlefish, not squid. Not that it would matter; squid are pretty damn smart too. Also octopodes - I think if they lived on land we'd end up enslaved by them.

Dolphins are smarter, certainly, though I haven't encountered actual dolphin steaks anywhere. Cats, definitely. Not dogs - except maybe border collies; those suckers can solve partial differential equations. I think that's actually what they're doing while they're herding sheep, just to keep themselves from being bored. Not just counting sheep, but integrating them over time. Doesn't matter - I don't eat dogs for other reasons, such as "carnivores taste terrible." Other dogs are merely trainable, which doesn't necessarily correlate with intelligence; after all, if I could train you to sit and play dead and fetch a ball on command, would that be proof of your intelligence? I don't think so.

Anyway, to bring the subject back to the link I provided above, it seems that even though I've decided not to eat anything smarter than I am, still, somehow, I regularly end up eating crow.