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Jan 18, 2025 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Welcome to this week’s reading list, a roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week includes recommended books about real estate development, which homes survived the LA fires, space startups, maps of agricultural suitability, hail incidence, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
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Jan 11, 2025 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at the fires in Los Angeles, self-driving tractors, a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, fake endangered species, and more.
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Dec 31, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
If you were making a list of the most important companies in the world, you’d find Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, somewhere very close to the top. It’s one of a tiny handful of companies, along with Intel and Samsung, that can make the most advanced microchips, and it has a commanding lead in that market. TSMC makes the microprocessors and 5G chips for Apple’s iPhones and Macbooks. It makes chips for both Intel and AMD.
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Dec 28, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Construction Physics year end stats, Chinese drug manufacturing, jet fighter-launched satellites, the stubbornness of coal, and more! Around 2/3rds of each reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer piece about the origins of TSMC that should be out next week.
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links about buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at commercial fusion, Boom’s new funding round, what sort of industrial policy is most efficient, AI fighter jets, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the content is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. If you are a paid subscriber, feel free to suggest a topic for a future newsletter in the comments below.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Because I write about infrastructure, and there’s an enormous amount of energy infrastructure that needs to be built for the US to decarbonize, I’m spending an increasingly large amount of time writing about energy and energy-related topics. One challenge I have with this is that thinking about energy doesn’t come especially naturally to me. I have an engineering background, but it’s in structural engineering, which only requires analyzing things that are sitting perfectly still.
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Dec 14, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links about buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Japanese semiconductor manufacturing, EV reliability, indoor air quality, mall to residential conversions, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the content is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Other items of note:I’m interested in talking to some architects and developers about how they decide on the design of the buildings they work on.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
On Construction Physics, we’ve talked frequently about the importance of learning curves as a mechanism by which things get lessexpensiveover time. Learning curves, also known as experience curves or Wright’s Law, track the relationship between cumulative production volume and cost. Specifically, goods tend to show a constant rate of cost decrease (known as the learning rate) for every cumulative doubling of production.
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Dec 7, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
No essay this week; I’m working on a longer piece about the development of polycrystalline diamond compact drill bits, which will be out next week. This week on the reading list we look at GDP growth by metro, wind and solar bans, battery material consumption, carmaker struggles, Norway and startups, and much more! Around 2/3rds of each reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
construction-physics.com | Brian Potter
This week on the reading list: high-rise construction, mild-hybrids, wind power difficulties, offshore drilling, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the list is paywalled, so become a paid subscriber for full access. High-rise constructionThis graphic shows high-rise construction (buildings 10 or more stories tall) in the US and Canada as of July 2024. It looks like the author manually created this dataset on a sort of city-by-city basis, so (as he acknowledges) it’s probably not 100% accurate.
