A recent graduation day brought back memories of my college ceremony. Boring, mostly, so I start reading the brochure honoring the new Phd grads, and listing their dissertation topics.
My favorite was a doctorate from the department of physical education :
“The effect of basketball weight on basketball free-throw shooting”
Now it’s your turn…
I once joined a Computer Science Department that had some holdovers from a Bygone Era in Semiotics.
Semiotics is the most amazing pile of crap I have ever seen. Makes Astrology look like a science.
Bound copies of theses were kept in the same room we held teas. Once in a while, someone would pull out a Semiotics thesis and try to just read the abstract without cracking up.
Even if I could remember the title of one, I couldn’t type it in since they used a goofy “symbols of symbols” system.
At the ceremony in which i received my undergrad degree there were also a number of Ph.D.s being honored.
The title of each dissertation was read out, and usually involved a huge title, with an even more voluminous post-colon subtitle, and a whole bunch of arcane jargon.
Then there was a guy from the department of (i think) biomechanics, who got a rousing cheer from the whole auditorium.
His dissertation title? How People Sit.
mhendo, that guy’s title may have been short and sweet, but at least there’s a chance that he actually produced something useful.
A master’s degree title that had my eyes rolling: Technical and Stylistic Changes in Type on National Geographic Maps, 1888-1988.
ftg, your post brought to mind the fact that Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics (although not computer science, obviously), and I realized I’d never bothered to find out exactly what that entailed. Out of curiosity I went hunting in UMI’s dissertation database using “semiotics” as a keyword. I didn’t find his dissertation there, not surprisingly, but I did find this listing on the first page of search results:
At least it didn’t have any funky, unreproduceable symbols in the abstract, which is somewhat ironic since this was a PhD in art history. 
“unreproduceable”? Holy cow. irreproducible.
:: slinks off to get more java ::