To the members of the Committee for the Study of the Irrelevant: Bill has recently been granted a job interview at Rose-Ulman college, the nation's premier undergraduate-only engineering school. To get to this point, he beat out a pool of 180 applicants to get to a phone interview, where he is finished in the top three. On February 14, he'll be flying to Indiana, someplace, to be giving thee lectures. While the college provides him with two topics, Bill gets to pick the topic for the third.

The committee recognizes the great accomplishments of Bill, and that this may be a very stressful time for him as well. In short, he needs our help in picking out a topic for "his" choice of presentations, rather than talking about something that he may be familiar with.

The committee responded with:

• The molecular engineering of squid
• Thermodynamics and kinetics of the Whomp-ass stir fry
• Cayenne pepper's effect on eyeballs
• Tesla: A guy who discovered something
• Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing the Gordita
• Engineering a failure: The New England Patriots
• Mechanics of Sex - How to calculate forces exerted on rigid bodies
• Engineering the Perfect Breast -- A calculus theory by Dave Sipley
• Fracture Mechanics -- OOPS! I didn't know steel became brittle in very cold water :-(refers to the titanic for those of you who don't know....)
• Politically Correct Engineering: What can we call it anymore when we just slap shit together?
• Why engineers get to wear those striped hats: A history
• Domestic engineer 2000 -- new opportunities in the households of the dotcom millionaires
• Engineering compensation: How to make as much as a Public Defense lawyer or a doctor who only speaks Gujarati
• Perpetual motion in the bidding process
• Cold fusion -- How Alyeska pipeline outhouses affected on-time performance.
• The relationship of Iron Chef Japanese's blood pressure to 1) the number of minutes he has left of the clock and 2) the creativity of his competitor and 3) the voice pitch of the Japanese Actress/Guest Taste-Tester in the studio that week
• The genetic makeup of the Iron Chefs - they may not be iron, but they're certainly not human
• The destruction of earth: an engineering analysis.
• Anatomy of the parietal eyes of cadavers provides evidence of alien life forms among us.
• Modeling the fall of man and the rise of horseshoe crabs.

He got the job.

Congratulations to the Committee for the Study of the Irrelevant's members for helping Bill through that difficult time in his life.