Disclaimer: any errors on this website are in fact an attempt to transcend the reality circumscribed by the limits of language.

Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My boneless, 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 fake startup that sells logs on wheels, a stupid Chrome extension, and esoteric sorting algorithms, as well as my research papers and conference presentations in atmospheric science and related fields.

Currently, I am a doctoral student in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University, studying under Daniel Jacob, and I freelance on the side for publications including Harper's and The Guardian (send me stories at drew@drewpendergrass.com). More importantly, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation, and I am not reptilian.

My newsletter on writing/science/etc:

Spotlight

An essay I wrote for the January-February 2020 issue of Harvard Magazine on beauty, mathematics, and environmental science: "Working at Beauty."

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/DM me on Twitter, but I'm trying to stop using it so much, so it's best to email me at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com (or the academic address in my CV). However, if your email is unpleasant, you should direct it to grievances@drewpendergrass.com, an inbox I definitely read.

Q. Who are you?

A. Well, to start off, I did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords, I take my eggs over easy, I keep all my eggs in separate baskets, I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers, and to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place. If you for some strange reason would like to know something substantial about me, you can check out my projects page or my CV.

This website proudly supports Otto Neurath and the ISOTYPE picture language

Please represent all social facts pictorially in your correspondence with the owner and proprietor of this website. Do your part to help build a pluralistic and anti-metaphysical theory of knowledge.

Some true statements

I keep the old gods ... I have never traveled to an exoplanet ... I have nothing to do with explosions ... I hold no world records ... I am not a substitute for a medical doctor ... I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota ... I am capable of reading English ... I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement ... I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse ... I accept the axiom of choice ... I am reluctant to resort to black magic ... I have no trouble distinguishing my right from my left ... I proudly possess object permanence ... my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense ... you cannot prove I have sympathies for the former state of Burgundy ...

A Moving, and Random, Quotation

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

-Stephen Jay Gould

Read more here.

Play Alchemy!

"So fun you won't even need friends!"

Bonus Content Zone!

Three Cryptic Messages Regarding Matters of Supreme Importance

1. It is necessary for you to trivialize your nations before they surrender your liberties.
2. All idols have been rejected. Please embrace the regulations.
3. Your neighbors will be vandalized.

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. 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.
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. (My lab partner Jackson Wagner points out that this is not a true sorting algorithm, since you still have to sort the population sizes. To Jackson, I reply that this is the least of our worries.)

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.