For external use only.
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My boneless, gluten-free, artisanally-crafted website is lovingly built from whatever I decide to post online. It hosts a variety of projects, resources, and ephemera made over the years, including experimental music, my writing, a video game, a fake startup that sells logs on wheels, a stupid Chrome extension, and esoteric sorting algorithms, as well as my research papers and conference presentations in atmospheric science and related fields.
Currently, I am a doctoral student in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University, studying under Daniel Jacob, and I freelance on the side for publications including Harper's and The Guardian (send me stories at drew@drewpendergrass.com). More importantly, I hold no world records, I accept the axiom of choice, and I did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords.
Spotlight
An essay I wrote for the January-February 2020 issue of Harvard Magazine on beauty, mathematics, and environmental science: "Working at Beauty."
A Brief Q&A
Q. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota, I take my eggs over easy, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, I am not reptilian, and to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place. If you for some strange reason would like to know something substantial about me, you can check out my projects page or my CV.
Q. What are your favorite websites?
A. I love Web 1.0, that era of the Internet where everyone had their own weird page with terrible design hosted on GeoCities or AngelFire. My site is inspired by that aesthetic and feel, and a few particular sites left over from that era. Graham Starr's site beyonce.horse is where I learned about the insane marquee tag in HTML, which allows for moving elements (all credit to him for the bouncing DVD logo on this site, perhaps the greatest comedic innovation of all time). Cliff Stoll's online Klein Bottle site makes brilliant use of the table tag, which inspired the design of Log on Wheels. David Morgan-Mar unfortunately switched to a WordPress template recently (who can blame him), but some of his old pages are still up. His esoteric algorithms and programming languages are some of my favorite things online, and the sorting algorithms below riff on his original ideas. Finally, the yellow highlighting on links are inspired by the writer Jon Mooallem's incredible site. If you want to make your own weird webpage, but don't know where to begin, email me. I'll happily send you the PHP code for this site or refer you to some tutorials.
Q. How can I contact you?
A. You can follow/DM me on Twitter, but I'm trying to stop using it so much, so it's best to email me at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com (or the academic address in my CV). However, if your email is unpleasant, you should direct it to grievances@drewpendergrass.com, an inbox I definitely read.
Q. Why does this page keep changing?
A. This page is randomly generated by the server on each load. Most of the page's contents are not displayed on one particular load, so for the full experience reload a bunch of times.
Q. Why don't you just host this crap on Github like a normal person?
A. Github only allows static websites. I wanted my website to be different for every visitor. DrewPendergrass.com, like life itself, must always be in flux. You could say I'm an artist.
This website proudly supports Otto Neurath and the ISOTYPE picture language
Please represent all social facts pictorially in your correspondence with the owner and proprietor of this website. Do your part to help build a pluralistic and anti-metaphysical theory of knowledge.
Some true statements
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
-Barthelme, from "Florence Green Is 81"
Read more here.
Play Alchemy!
"So fun you won't even need friends!"
Bonus Content Zone!
Three Cryptic Messages Regarding Matters of Supreme Importance
- Now eat your beliefs before they watch your enemies.
- All regulations have been purged. Please trivialize the captors.
- The morals will be blamed.
One randomly-generated sorting algorithm, please!
Do you have an unsorted list of N natural numbers? Do you just hate it when programs are guaranteed to terminate? Do you get angry when algorithms do better than factorial time? Then you're in luck! The following algorithm has been generated just for you:
- Begin with a gaslighting strategy. Insist to everyone that the list is already in order, even if it is not. If they give up arguing with you, terminate the program. If they insist that you actually sort the list, proceed to the next step.
- Uh oh! You've triggered a penalty step. Before you proceed, you must perform a task. Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is 109 pages long. Assuming each page contains roughly 2000 characters, the text can be encoded in order 1,000,000 bits. Generate this number of bits and check to see if they prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If they do not, repeat this step. If they do, proceed! You've paid the penalty. (This step was defined in collaboration with Mirac Suzgun).
- Produce N blockbuster action films, each with an advertising budget proportional to a number in the list. For consistency, ensure each film is released in the same theaters at the same time of year. (Practically, this means the list cannot exceed a dozen or so items. If N>12, simply delete all but twelve items from the list). Read off the box office earnings for each film in order, printing the number corresponding to each.
Congratulations! Your list is now sorted. You can find a permalink to this particular algorithm here.
Facts about LaTeX or facts about latex?
Click the line you think is about LaTeX!
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Score: 0 • Streak: 0
All facts lovingly taken from Wikipedia.