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."

Comments

Before sarcasm is toted around here...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Wet dogs vs. wet t-shirts

[PatPending]

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?

Re:Tragedy

[severoon]

Awesome! Now there's enough research in this field to get funding for that baby shaking study I've been wanting to do...