"Content so exclusive it cannot be found in any of the world's most famous museums."
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My gluten-free, low-sodium, organic 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 have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers, I am capable of reading English, and I am not a substitute for a medical doctor.
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. 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!
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. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, I have never traveled to an exoplanet, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement, I have nothing to do with explosions, and I proudly possess object permanence. 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 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.
Some true statements
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"
Read more here.
Bonus Content Zone!
Three Cryptic Messages Regarding Matters of Supreme Importance
- It is necessary for you to vandalize your neighbors before they eat your morals.
- The slogans have been purged. Please embrace the beliefs.
- All perceptions will be imperilled.
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. 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 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.