If you are looking for a time waster — and I certainly am — you might find this list interesting browsing.

It’s the winners of this year’s Hoopes Prize, given out for the best undergraduate theses at Harvard.

The list as a whole is pretty amusing. Most of them are breathtakingly obscure, some sound quite useful (like the project Appropriate Rondavel Chimney: Reducing Indoor Air Pollution in Rural Southern Africa), and a good quarter or so tell you everything you need to know about their biases or conclusions from the get go.

Milton’s Teleological Psychology? Well, Milton’s psychology was teleological: that about answers it. And, likewise, the title sort of gives away the drift of Remagining the Revolutionary Vanguard: Frantz Fanon and the Task of the Intellectual.

The most riotous, however, has got to be the person who received Harvard’s top honor for a thesis entitled Being B-Boys: Style, Identity, and Respect Among New England and Miami Street Dancers.

(N.B. Wikipedia tells me a “B-boy” or “B-girl” is “a person devoted to hip-hop culture.” Though Wikipedia being well below the acceptable standards of citation for “scholarly work,” I’m sure the author of this thesis probably puts that definition through the wringer of Foucault and Anthony Giddens.)