I heard from David Feitler, who had sent this. He writes:

I [Feitler] agree that this project and others may have their risible aspects. But we also have projects about improving the fuel efficiency of cars, providing nutrition to starving children and so on. I’m not going to ask you to take down the blog post….but could I have some sort of response there?

I was unfair in describing Feitler’s email to me as spam. As he wrote,

You published a paper a while back on the statistics of serial dilution, using cockroach allergens as the study basis. That got picked up by us in a search for people who were studying allergens of all kinds, and was assimilated into a category of people with an interest in food technology. We have a bias towards inclusiveness and broad interpretation of the fields of endeavor that might help our clients.

Here’s the latest project:

I am contacting you to make you aware of NineSigma Request, RFP# 50453-1, “Aroma Integrator- Aroma Blend Composer, Analyzer and Sniffing Station.” . . .

There are a lot of interesting applied projects out there . . .