Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My organic, artisanally-crafted, gluten-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, atmospheric physics, 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. 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 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. I am the publisher of the Harvard Political Review and an associate editor for the weekly magazine of the The Crimson. More importantly, I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers, I keep all my eggs in separate baskets, and I am not reptilian.
Spotlight
Read an article I wrote in the Harvard Political Review about the sky high price of insulin in the United States: "How Insulin Became Unaffordable."
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. 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 accept the axiom of choice, I am not a substitute for a medical doctor, I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse, I proudly possess object permanence, 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 resume.
Some true statements
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
Let us imagine that we are reading [poetry] or, even better, the words of some mystic, such as Isaac the Syrian, and we try conscientiously to understand the experiences described, but we approach the words with reflection. What will we see then? Nothing, except that which is known to the scientific worldview now -- that is, nothing except physiological and empirico-psychological processes. The mystical experiences will fall apart into optical, thermal, acoustic, muscular, and general-somatic sensations and into naked assertions of the specialness of this complex of sensations. However, the latter, that is, the pretension to specialness of experience, will remain completely unjustified and will even clearly contradict the total fragmentation of the described processes into "ordinary" sensations. This analysis is right in its own way, but that is the case precisely because science does not have the means to capture mystical experiences, and instead of them it catches concomitant processes -- what remains in the hands is not the essense, but foam; not the pearl, but mud. But as soon as we approach the work in a different way and look at it directly, its supra-terminological content is revealed to the spirit: in simple words, in terminologically insignificant words, something infinitely dear and fragrant, like a baby's half-forgotten smile, awakes and looks out at us -- he has just opened his clear little eyes and is stretching his little arms from his bed towards the pillar of golden dust that has broken through the curtain.
-Pavel Florensky, from "The Empyrean and the Empirical"
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. Obtain one (1) chess grandmaster. You are generous, so you let them go first. After they move their piece, move a random one of yours to a random cell on the board. If this move violates the rules of chess, flip the board in anger and start again. If it is a legal move, continue playing until either the board is flipped or checkmate. If the grandmaster has won, repeat the game. If you won, proceed to the next step. You've paid the penalty.
- 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.