Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My gluten-free, artisanally-crafted, low-sodium 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, atmospheric physics, my writing, a video game, a startup that sells logs on wheels, and esoteric sorting algorithms.
Currently, I study physics and mathematics at Harvard University. I am an undergraduate research assistant for Daniel Jacob at Harvard, where I use machine learning and extreme value theory to study the connections between climate and air quality. I am spending 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've been exploring the use of topological data analysis and manifold learning to understand the nonlinear interactions between ozone, meteorology, and the biosphere. I am the publisher of the Harvard Political Review and an associate editor for the weekly magazine of the The Crimson. More importantly, I keep the old gods, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, and I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers.
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. 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. What is your favorite artificial flavor?
A. I am a big green apple fan, but I can go for some watermelon as well. Some days I go wild and get blue raspberry, especially if it's spelled 'Blu Razzberry.'
Q. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, I have never traveled to an exoplanet, I am not a substitute for a medical doctor, I am capable of reading English, I have nothing to do with explosions, and I am not reptilian. If you for some strange reason would like to know something substantial about me, you can check out my projects page or my resume.
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.
Some true statements
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
As each of us considers himself sufficiently capable of practicing justice, each of us naturally thinks that a system under which he yielded power would be a reasonably just one. This is the temptation Christ underwent at the hands of the devil. Men are continually succumbing to it.
-Simone Weil
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:
- Feed your list into a black hole, permanently destroying the information. The list is as good as sorted now! If people shake their heads and insist you actually sort the list, just generate a new one and 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.