Counterintuitive Trick

[Feynman ..] much later, having settled into a domestic existence complete with garden and porch, taught himself how to train dogs to do counterintuitive tricks for example, to pick up a nearby sock not by the direct route but by the long way round, circling through the garden, in the porch door and back out again. (He did the training in stages, breaking the problem down until after a while it was perfectly obvious to the dog that one did not go directly to the sock.)

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This really cracked me up; I just imagined a dog, looking at a sock, and immediately going the other way just to fetch to it much later. It is cruel at some level, but comedic too. The passage above is from James Gleick’s book Genius, I read it many years ago, I re-read parts of it recently. Great book.