"Content so exclusive it cannot be found in any of the world's most famous museums."
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My organic, boneless, low-sodium 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 traveled to an exoplanet, I am not reptilian, and I am reluctant to resort to black magic.
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. 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 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 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. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, I proudly possess object permanence, my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense, I keep all my eggs in separate baskets, I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers, and I have nothing to do with explosions. If you for some strange reason would like to know something substantial about me, you can check out my projects page or my CV.
Some true statements
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
[N]one of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to danice to, when we long to move the stars to pity.
-Flaubert, from Madame Bovary
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:
- 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. 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).
- 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.