Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My organic, fair trade, gluten-free 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 capable of reading English, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, and I accept the axiom of choice.

Spotlight

Read an article I cowrote in The Crimson on two Harvard scientists and the unethical tests they ran to create the first birth control pill: "The Bitter Pill: Harvard and the Dark History of Birth Control."

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. 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. Who are you?

A. Well, to start off, my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense, you cannot prove I have sympathies for the former state of Burgundy, I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse, I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement, and I did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords. 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.

Some true statements

I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota ... I proudly possess object permanence ... I am reluctant to resort to black magic ... I have nothing to do with explosions ... I take my eggs over easy ... I keep all my eggs in separate baskets ... I have no trouble distinguishing my right from my left ... I have never commanded an army composed of more than 100,000 soldiers ... I keep the old gods ... I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation ... to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place ... I have never traveled to an exoplanet ... I hold no world records ... I am not a substitute for a medical doctor ... I am not reptilian ...

From the archives

A Moving, and Random, Quotation

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

-W.H. Auden

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. 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. 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.
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.