With great precision and no mess. Perhaps you've already seen this; if not, you should. Be sure to watch the video.
The natural world is full of astonishing things. And the more closely we look at them the more astonishing they seem. I recall watching my little dog Andy one night as he considered whether or not to jump from the chair he was in to the chair I was in, or to jump down to the floor, then back up to my chair. It was not so close that he could simply do it, nor so far that it was obviously hopeless. Also the angle was a little awkward–the chairs were at right angles to each other, which would make the takeoff and landing a little more difficult. He sat there and fretted for a bit, indecisive, and it occurred to me that an enormous work of analysis was going on in his brain: all sorts of computations involving distance, velocity, mass, and energy, which I'm sure would be difficult to replicate, and even more so to replicate in a machine that could do similar work in any situation in which a dog might find himself. And then there was the fact that he somehow knew that the jump was risky but not impossible. These things only fail to impress us most of the time because we're surrounded by them. (Andy finally decided to try the jump: he made it.)
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