"Content so exclusive it cannot be found in any of the world's most famous museums."
Hi, I'm Drew Pendergrass. My boneless, gluten-free, 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 am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold, I am not to my knowledge a victim of a mummy's curse, and I proudly possess object permanence.
Spotlight
Read an article I wrote in the Harvard Political Review about the sky high price of insulin in the United States: "How Insulin Became Unaffordable."
A Brief Q&A
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 did not orchestrate the Camp David Accords, I have never advocated on behalf of, or against, the Free Silver movement, I am not a substitute for a medical doctor, I keep the old gods, and I appreciate knowledge of the outcome of a given situation. 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.
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
From the archives
A Moving, and Random, Quotation
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.
-Annie Dillard
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:
- 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.
- 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 Robert Bork or facts about Björk?
Click the line you think is about Robert Bork!
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Score: 0 • Streak: 0
All facts lovingly taken from Wikipedia.