The weird thing is that this appears to be quite serious (although it contains jokes, and quite right too), and motivated by a genuine need to understand the dy

The weird thing is that this appears to be quite serious (although it contains jokes, and quite right too), and motivated by a genuine need to understand the dynamics of coupled cow ensembles. And there's an interesting and nonobvious result: you can increase the coupling between your cows and get their behaviour to synchronize less. (Although that's only true for a particular configuration of which cows interact with which others, and it's probably not realistic.) Their main example of this isn't quite as surprising as it sounds, to me at least: there's some lag in the influence of one cow on another, and the situation in which increased coupling reduces synchronization is one where there are long chains of mutually influencing cows. I loved this sentence, from the second page: "Cattle are ruminants, so it is biologically plausible to view them as oscillators." The paper actually has pictures in it showing spherical cows. The acknowledgements say: "We thank [...] Puck Rombach for assistance with cow puns, and Yulian Ng for drawing a spherical cow for us." Obviously it's a fair assumption that everyone reading their paper is familiar with the joke.