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Physicists Discover Universal "Wet-Dog Shake" Rule
Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."
Here we come!!!
The formula is significant for us in the ad/entertainment industry who relies on algorithms to animate such motions. It sure beats trying to manually animating each fur (impossible), or coming up with a workaround that only approximates reality through trial and error. This will significantly reduce render times.
The same could be said about fluid dynamics a decade ago - now we can create whole above/underwater environments within the computer - saving time and cost of flooding entire soundstages.
Leave it to a bunch of nerds to focus on wet dogs. I for one would rather focus on wet t-shirts: what is the period of oscillation of those boobs?
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Ok, FTFA, it seems that the researchers did a very simplistic model and then found some videos so that they can measure what the animals actually do and noticed that they did not fit their model. So, nothing to see here until someone really sits down and models the wet dog oscillations with accuracy and tell us what the optimal frequency is (so that we can teach our dog if it is not that good with drying of course!).
Nah, there are easier ways to get dry. My dog quickly moved from the "shake myself dry method" to the "the rug and furniture are my towel method".
She's found this to be truly superior although some preliminary research showing a combined "shake myself dry" followed by "the rug and furniture are my towel" method may be her best option.
When I told her to get off the couch she just grinned and said "I'm a bitch, deal with it."
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Awesome! Now there's enough research in this field to get funding for that baby shaking study I've been wanting to do...
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
My question was never "how does a dog shake so as to dry his fur?" but rather "WHY must my dog walk up next to me immediately before doing so?"