Talk:Spherical cow

message: As I write this, this page has been marked with the notability tag.
I disagree that this concept is not notable enough. I have come across the spherical cow in multiple situations leading me to believe that it is a popular expression among people making theoretical models based on simplified assumptions.
If someone has a source it might be good to add it to the page.
Siker 18:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page notability 

message: Is the joke quoted, from somewhere or by someone?  Only it looks like a quote, which should be attributed to someone.Merkinsmum 22:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Joke

message: Is the image even ok to use/not copyrighted?Merkinsmum 22:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the description: The image was created by Ingrid Kallick for the program cover of the 1996 annual meeting of the American Astronomical Association. Is Tkirkman the same as Ingrid Kallik? --Brian Josephson (talk) 09:35, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Image

message: There's a related joke about the engineer, logician, and physicist travelling through arbitrary sheep country. Engineer says "Look, they have black sheep here." Logician says "They have at least one black sheep here." Physicist says "Consider an infinite plane sheep with a single hair."
John Y (talk) 11:15, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The sceptic comments: "Well, they have sheep that are black on one side."--Niels Ø (noe) (talk) 11:41, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Covered at Mathematical_joke#Stereotypes_of_mathematicians... -- AnonMoos (talk) 01:10, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sheep version 

message: The article is currently marked as a stub: "you can help Wikipedia by expanding it".  I suggest removing this tag.  While I agree with everyone above that this article deserves inclusion, it's hard to see how there's much more to say.  Perhaps more references could be added, but essentially the article is complete — short and sweet.  Not every topic needs a long article.  Other opinions?  158.109.1.15 (talk) 19:04, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.--Noe (talk) 21:02, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

text: OK, no one's disagreed, so I've removed the stub tag. 86.0.202.218 (talk) 19:25, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Stub?

message: I prefer the longer punchline:  Assume a spherical cow, radiating milk isotropically... -- Coneslayer (talk) 14:46, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Radiation 

message: This page would probably be difficult for anyone who didn't study applied mechanics at school... is there some wikipedia article we can link to which describes the smooth planes, rigid levers,  massless  inextenisble ropes, frictionless pulleys and all the other favourite characters from the math book which this joke lampoons? 78.86.37.93 (talk) 19:49, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a reasonably good introduction in this article: https://www.wired.com/2011/02/what-is-up-with-the-spherical-cow/  Aliza250 (talk) 03:14, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

text: In school, our chemistry master used to joke about 'a gas-tight yet weightless and perfectly frictionless piston'.  Inspired by this description, I dreamt up the rhythmic extension: 'a gas-tight yet weightless and perfectly frictionless piston in cylinder'. --Brian Josephson (talk) 09:50, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Background info needed 

message: i know, that in russia (and in most ex-ussr space) the most common term for bad aproximation is "spherical horse in vacum".
the source of this term is (at least usually is mentioned as) the following joke :
one rich person involved in hippodrome betting asks 3 scientists - a mathematican, a biologist and a physicist - to find some ways how to predict which horse is the best. he grants one million $US to each of scientists and one year to solve the problem. after  one year of research mathematican gives back half of the summ to the requester and tells, that he has created a well working statistical scheme giving good chance of prediction based on previous run results. biologist tells, that based on information on particular horses parents, how it has been fed, and nd how it has been trained, he can find out what is the maximum speed the horse can achieve. physicist states, that he needs a lab of 30 people, 50.000.000 $ more and 10 more years, to extend the research onhis theory, that at the moment basically describes only spherical horses in vacum.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.237.143.219 (talk) 22:04, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That is the variant I heard (in English) -it's much funnier, IMHO, than the cow/milk angle. Happily, I found it on BoingBoing and have added a mention. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:56, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Looking at it again, I think the joke's already presented via the Russian angle, so I've removed the BoingBoing refer. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:03, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: According to Gorman & others, if I read that correctly, the horse joke was used to demonstrate the simplification problem by David Gooding and the anecdote is attributed originally to Adam Katalsky, in New Scientist, December 19-26, 1992. See  AgadaUrbanit (talk) 19:45, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  similar "aproximations" in other languages 

message: As with so many physics problem ( black holes etc.) the  theoretical physicists are just ahead of their time by assuming the existence of  spherical cows and  chickens.  As usual it takes  experimental physicists decades to bring them into evidence. Cows and chickens in this form are just not strongly interactive anymore as they have stopped grazing and pecking almost entirely.
--Christian Benesch  (talk) 12:43, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confirmation will come 

message: A funny quote regarding same topic, from Hudibras: 
*For as whipp'd tops and bandied balls,
*The learned hold, are animals;
*So horses they affirm to be
*Mere engines made by geometry
--CopperKettle 05:26, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  A 17th century quote

message: Where does the part "in a vacuum" come from? Early versions of the joke (e.g. in Harte's 1988 book Consider a Spherical Cow or Smolin's 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos) present it as an anecdote in which the punchline is that the report produced by the scientists starts with the words "Consider a spherical cow...". Not only is that more funny than the more elaborate version, but also a better illustration of the concept.  --Lambiam 22:31, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  In a vacuum? 

message: I put the article "The" at the start of the first sentence, because it really seems very strange to say "Spherical cow is a metaphor".  The metaphor is the concept of a spherical cow.  Just saying "Spherical cow is a metaphor" makes it sound as if "Spherical cow" is a substance or a proper name.  Adding the article makes it clearer. --Slashme (talk) 15:42, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: See also Reasonable person, where the same form is used: the name of the article is "reasonable person", but the lead sentence starts with "The". --Slashme (talk) 15:46, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: And see also Computational biology: Beyond the spherical cow.  Note: not "Beyond spherical cow", which would sound as if it was written by a Russian. --Slashme (talk) 15:53, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The spherical cow" or just "Spherical cow"? 

message: A while back I removed an illustration of a spherical cow superimposed on a moon because I thought it was irrelevant - it doesn't show the concept as described in this article, as a metaphor for scientific  disconnect from reality, but seems to be a goofy variant of the "cow jumped over the moon" jingle. Wikipedia isn't a magazine, and illustrations shouldn't be included because they're nice to look at, or break up the text, but only if they provide information.
It has been returned with the comment "The spherical cow picture was nice, and I don't see any harm done by it" - which in my opinion is exactly the wrong way to approach an illustration with a wikipedia article. The anon. editor noted that wikipedia is WP:Not paper and thus we don't need to conserve paper or toner - but we do need to conserve readers' attention.
Rather than remove it, as was my first idea, I wonder if anybody else has an opinion? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 15:00, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: No, wait: I have changed my mind, since checking the wikimedia file on the illustration finds that it was made specficially in reference to modeling for astronomers - I've expanded the caption to explain this. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:39, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustration 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: To be sure it's a long way from amphioxus, but most of us since then -- including cows -- have been more nearly homeomorphic to a torus than to a sphere. I think that's part of the gag, at least when a mathematician or a biologist uses it. Gambaguru (talk) 08:06, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm fairly certain that cows being homeomorphic to spheres (or more realistically higher genus surfaces depending on what counts as a hole) is unrelated to the "Spherical Cow" joke. The reason for assuming a spherical cow is for simplification purposes in mathematical modelling. Homeomorphisms have nothing to do with it. CoronalMassAffection (talk) 20:47, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Homeomorphism 

message: I've literally never heard of spherical cows before (outside a discussion on bloating...). IMHE, the joke has always been predicting race results on the (more specific, thus funnier) basis of assuming "spherical <animals> running in a vacuum". Which works for horses, but not for cows. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:05, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agreed entirely but judging from that book title and that Astronomical Society illustration, it's a thing. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:06, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cows?   Or [[spherical horse]]s? 

message: "A cow, which for simplicity we will take to be spherical".  I'm not sure if this has ever been written down but it is pretty realistic in giving a motive for the absurd concept, and might be considered an improvement.  But I suppose no good for the article if there isn't a source. I have found though a nice reference which could be added to the article if accompanied by appropriate text, see: https://astrobites.org/2014/10/07/tipping-the-spherical-cow-the-initial-conditions-of-star-formation/.  --Brian Josephson (talk) 10:38, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  For simplicity 

message: I propose the section on the Turing's citation should be removed.
It is only apparently related to the subject by mentioning animals and spherical symmetry. Turing is not discussing at all model conception, nor simplifying hypotheses, he's discussing the possibility of forming a complex animal configuration (like a horse) from an apparently high-symmetry object (a horse's egg cell).
Joaosampaio (talk) 10:42, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: That's fine by me; you make a good point. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 11:45, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turing section is not related to the article 

message: https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2011/02/11/kojis-blog/ 
"Even spherical cows have udders" Aliza250 (talk) 03:44, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another NASA reference, since the existing one is archived  

message: I don't think the Alan Turing reference belongs in this article, despite talking about spherical-ness and horses. It concern a totally different concept about the nature of physical reality; it has nothing to do with a joking reference to the limits of modeling. Here it is: 
:Alan Turing, in his 1952 paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", asserted: "a system which has spherical symmetry, and whose state is changing because of chemical reactions and diffusion ... cannot result in an organism such as a horse, which is not spherically symmetrical."[8] 
I would like to remove it; what do people think? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:47, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Nobody objected, so I've removed it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 16:15, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  That Alan Turing reference