Disclaimer: this website is composed of symbols and images that do not in themselves carry meaning outside of a total social situation which none of us choose.

Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My organic, low-sodium, GMO-free 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 have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota, I accept the axiom of choice, and I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers.

The latest science!

Pendergrass, D. C., D. J. Jacob, S. Zhai, J. Kim, J-H. Koo, S. Lee, M. Bae, and S. Kim. (2021). Continuous mapping of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) air quality in East Asia at daily 6x6 km² resolution by application of a random forest algorithm to 2011-2019 GOCI geostationary satellite data. Under review at Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. PDF. Publisher's preprint. Associated dataset available from Dataverse. Video of 15-minute oral presentation.

Figure: Daily PM_2.5 concentrations during a pollution event in the North China Plain, around Beijing (December 16-21, 2016). Predictions from the random forest algorithm (background, on 6x6 km² grid scale) are compared to observations made on the ground (circles). We see that the model is able to reproduce even this extreme level of pollution.

You can learn more about my research on the projects page, or you can read through all of our scientific papers and presentations on their respective pages.

Pre-order our book here (out April 19, 2022)!

My newsletter on writing/science/etc:

Writing 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. 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. 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. Who are you?

A. Well, to start off, I am not reptilian, I am capable of reading English, I keep all my eggs in separate baskets, I did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords, and I take my eggs over easy. If you for some strange reason would like to know something substantial about me, you can check out my projects page or my CV.

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

to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place ... I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation ... I have nothing to do with explosions ... I am reluctant to resort to black magic ... I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold ... I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement ... my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense ... I am not a substitute for a medical doctor ... I have never traveled to an exoplanet ... you cannot prove I have sympathies for the former state of Burgundy ... I proudly possess object permanence ... I hold no world records ... I have no trouble distinguishing my right from my left ... I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse ... I keep the old gods ...

A Moving, and Random, Quotation

Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. Of never becoming resigned, consoled: never turning over in bed to face the wall and drift asleep as if nothing had happened, as if nothing could happen.

-Cixous, from Coming to Writing

Read more here.

Play Alchemy!

"So fun you won't even need friends!"

Bonus Content Zone!

Three Cryptic Messages Regarding Matters of Supreme Importance

1. Please corrupt your perceptions before they surrender your dreams.
2. Your gods have been redacted. It is time to blame the idols.
3. All captors will be trivialized.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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. (My lab partner Jackson Wagner points out that this is not a true sorting algorithm, since you still have to sort the population sizes. To Jackson, I reply that this is the least of our worries.)

Congratulations! Your list is now sorted. You can find a permalink to this particular algorithm here.

Facts about corn or facts about Korn?

Click the line you think is about corn!

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Score: 0 • Streak: 0

All facts lovingly taken from Wikipedia.