"Content so exclusive it cannot be found in any of the world's most famous museums."
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My fair trade, low-sodium, artisanally-crafted 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 am on staff for Harvard Magazine, the Harvard Political Review, and the weekly magazine of The Harvard Crimson. More importantly, I take my eggs over easy, I accept the axiom of choice, and my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense.
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. 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. 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 advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement, I hold no world records, I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse, I proudly possess object permanence, 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 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
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
-Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass
Read more here.
Bonus Content Zone!
Three Cryptic Messages Regarding Matters of Supreme Importance
- You must vandalize your morals before they trivialize your nations.
- All beliefs have been watched. Please gaslight the gods.
- Your perceptions will be compromised.
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.
- 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 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.