Reticulating splines is a ripoff from Sim City. Whenever you create a new city or load an existing one, you see a loading screen with all sorts of status messages that really don't make sense. One of those status messages is "Reticulating splines". For some reason, that's the only one I remember because I really never knew what the heck that meant.

I think that's a joke. I remember that one game I used to play would put up crazy status messages as it was loading/creating a level for you. Such as "Dividing by zero" or "Calculating the Square root of -1"

However a quick google search turned up this gem
"Reticulating Splines: 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. "

I found this on one blog: Reticulating splines is the process of combining a series of short lines and curves into a longer spline or network of splines. It's a process used in the landscape generator in many computer games. Basically, the engine generates a few small patches of terrain and then interpolates between these.

And this on another: 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.

But I think in this case it is a cute reference to what you see when The Sims or Sim City is starting up...it always says Reticulating Splines at the bottom which apparently was a joke put in by the programmers since in The Sims games no terrain is actually generated.

In Sim City 2000, they even joked about that. They used a sound file with this woman in a sexy voice saying "Reticulating splines". This was wile creating / loading a city as well. I always thought it was funny.

Bet you didn't expect so many responses to this one ;)