Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My organic, artisanally-crafted, boneless 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 am reluctant to resort to black magic, I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation, and I accept the axiom of choice.

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. Who is our most attractive president?

A. The basic answer here is JFK, but I ask everyone to reconsider one Franklin Pierce. Sure he was a terrible president, but look at that hair!

Q. Who are you?

A. Well, to start off, I take my eggs over easy, I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse, I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers, my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense, and I keep all my eggs in separate baskets. 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. 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.

Some true statements

I am not a substitute for a medical doctor ... I have nothing to do with explosions ... you cannot prove I have sympathies for the former state of Burgundy ... I did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords ... I keep the old gods ... I hold no world records ... I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota ... I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold ... to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place ... I am capable of reading English ... I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement ... I am not reptilian ... I have no trouble distinguishing my right from my left ... I have never traveled to an exoplanet ... I proudly possess object permanence ...

From the archives

A Moving, and Random, Quotation

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,-- and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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:

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.

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.