Hey there! I am Ryan Mercer and I've been blogging a long time, here are some favourite posts of mine. Enjoy!
Counterfeit silver - this is an occasionally updated post where I document known counterfeit silver that I, and members of /r/silverbugs, have had cross our hands.
Humanity's end: the time we waste on virtual lives - where I look at the man hours that go into playing video games and what we might do with them instead.
Environmental impact of textile manufacturing - where I look at what sort of resources go into producing 1kg of cotton and 1kg of polyester fiber, I was a bit shocked.
Is Pokémon Go funded by the CIA? - a mostly tongue-in-cheek look at the game with potential uses as an intelligence gathering asset and actual connections to the CIA.
This just in, you don’t matter - a post where I look at how insigifnicant we are in the universe and try and come to a plausible estimate about how common varying forms of life are in our universe.
Tackling the problem of food production - a look at the challenges facing us with our food supply and how indoor farming might help us, feature three entities currently working on viable commercial indoor farming operations.
9,271.66665 jigawatts Marty (1.21 gigawatts Marty) - did you ever wonder how much energy a can of beer would have produced in that Mr. Fusion?
What bothers me about most time travel - title says it all.
DNA Data Storage - back in 2013 I was curious to see how much data could be stored in DNA after having read an article about humans using DNA as a storage medium. Determining the weight of a human strand of DNA was a bit of a challenge at the time which made it all the more fun to write.
My LEGO MOC of habitat modules for a Mars mission and how I'd set up the first colony - again, the title says it all.
Sustainability of the bullet proof diet (grass fed beef) for the Earth's population. - back in 2013 I was looking at the 'bulletproof diet' and immediately realized it couldn't be sustainable for a worldwide population so I wanted to see how sustainable it would be (impossible actually). While this is a diet with lots of grass-fed beef it is still a good look at how unsustainable (and environmentally demanding) using animals for feeding large populations actually is. I love meat but ehhhh.
Stop saying sweet potatoes are more nutritious than white potatoes! - I got tired of people calling white potatoes the devil and insisting that sweet potatoes were some miraculous gift from the universe, nutritionally they are very similar with only minor differences with neither being a clear victor. The biggest difference being white potatoes are calorically denser.