"Content so exclusive it cannot be found in any of the world's most famous museums."
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My fair trade, 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 startup that sells logs on wheels, a stupid Chrome extension, and esoteric sorting algorithms.
Currently, I study physics and mathematics at Harvard University. For my first three years of college I was an undergraduate research assistant in Daniel Jacob's computational atmospheric chemistry group at Harvard, which culminated in a research paper on Beijing air quality published in Geophysical Research Letters. I spent summer 2018 as a research assistant for Amos Tai at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, funded by the Harvard-China Project on the Environment; I explored the use of topological data analysis and manifold learning to understand the nonlinear interactions between ozone, meteorology, and the biosphere (it didn't work). I currently work with Samuel Myers and Matthew Smith at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where I research how drought affects global agricultural commodity trade with an emphasis on health outcomes in low-income nations. I write for the Harvard Political Review and the weekly magazine of The Harvard Crimson. More importantly, I am not reptilian, I keep all my eggs in separate baskets, and I am not a substitute for a medical doctor.
Spotlight
Read a profile of Yon Lee, a Boston-area kung fu legend, that I wrote for The Crimson: "Harvard's Tai Chi Master."
A Brief Q&A
Q. How can I contact you?
A. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Soundcloud; you can contact me at drew@drewpendergrass.com.
Please address all complaints and denials of climate change to grievances@drewpendergrass.com, an email address that is definitely not just a sassy autoresponder.
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.
Q. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation, I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota, I accept the axiom of choice, I keep the old gods, and I hold no world records. 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. Why don't you like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights?
A. It seems like the whole world is against me on this one, but Heathcliff is a jerk! And no, his circumstances do not justify his jerkiness! Look, I get why Heathcliff wants revenge, and I know he was wronged, but I can't help but just be repulsed by his behavior. Heathcliff apologists, it's YOU who should be defending yourselves!
Some true statements
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
We know, indeed, what history can do when it gains a certain ascendancy, we know it only too well: it can cut off the strongest instincts of youth, its fire, defiance, unselfishness and love, at the roots, damp down the heat of its sense of justice, suppress or regress its desire to mature slowly with the counter-desire to be ready, useful, fruitful as quickly as possible, cast morbid doubt on its honesty and boldness of feeling; indeed, it can even deprive youth of its fairest privilege, of its power to implant in itself the belief in a great idea and then let it grow to an even greater one.
-Nietzche, from "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life"
Read more here.
Bonus Content Zone!
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).
- You turn to mathematical ecology for inspiration. For each number in your list, generate a population of rabbits proportional to the number and a population of wolves inversely proportional to the number. Wait for each system to equilibrate. Read off the equilibrium population of rabbits in order of population size, printing the number corresponding to each.
Congratulations! Your list is now sorted. You can find a permalink to this particular algorithm here.
Facts about Robert Bork or facts about Björk?
Click the line you think is about Robert Bork!
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Score: 0 • Streak: 0
All facts lovingly taken from Wikipedia.