Fedora 18 release name

[Michael Hannon]

>>> Spherical Cow is really an idiom, and arguably not a normal adjective-noun
>>> pair.
>> Justify it all you want, it still sounds like "Copying Ubuntu" to me.
>
> Dudes, it's just a name.
> Please, focus on technical.

I'm late to this (all-important) thread, but I haven't seen anybody mention
the origin of the term "spherical cow".  It's a physics joke, or, maybe
better, a joke about physicists.  The world is a complicated place, and to
make any progress in analyzing it, physicists (and other scientists) have to
resort to simplifying assumptions.  E.g., the earth and the sun are not really
spheres,  but if you ignore that geometric subtlety, you can do some
reasonable calculations about the gravitational interaction of the sun and the
earth.

Non-physicists tend to view this approach as a simplistic retreat from
reality.  Hence, the joke: A physics professor says to the class, "consider a
spherical cow of mass M".

-- Mike