reticulating splines

Nonsense technobabble used in a production context.

Reticulating splines started off as an in-joke at Maxis and grew to fame with the widespread popularity of The Sims. While it does have a "real" meaning, this definition isn't actually correct in the context of its use. It's really a programming joke.

Reticulating splines is essentially filler. Don't want to describe what's holding up the program? It's reticulating splines. Why isn't the Internet working? The splines aren't reticulated. Heck, don't want to explain your calculus assignment? We're reticulating splines this week.

See also processor gremlins for the computer hardware equivalent.

v.
A necessary computation performed by numerous Maxis Sim games. Content simply cannot be generated without meticulous reticulation.

See: reticulatingsplines on ytmnd for further information.

The process of combining many short lines and curves into longer, interpolated ones called "splines."

Also, the process of combining many imprecise and abstract ideas into one larger, complex one.

Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness.