Reading List 07/05/2025
A microscopic electric motor, California’s CEQA rollback, a US shipbuilding startup, Chinese map obfuscation, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a microscopic electric motor, California’s CEQA rollback, a US shipbuilding startup, Chinese map obfuscation, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
No essay this week, but working on a piece about federal land ownership that will be out next week. In the meantime here’s a few other pieces of content:
I was on the Maritime Nation podcast talking about US shipbuilding
Chad Syverson and I have a paper up on NBER that looks at rising construction costs in individual US metros over the last several decades. (I’ll probably write a post at some point talking about this paper in more detail.)
McClellan’s micromotor
In 1959 Richard Feynman gave what became a very famous lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (currently at over 7000 citations), where he argues that there should be more research in how to move things at a very small scale, down to the level of individual atoms. The lecture is wide-ranging, and includes this interesting strategy for how very small machines might be constructed:
You know, in atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can’t handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the “hands” there…
I want to build much the same device — a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the “hands” taht you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one-quarter scale anyway…So I manufacture a quarter-sized lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools and I make at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system…to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors…
At the end of the lecture, Feynman offered two $1000 prizes: one for the first person who can scale a page of a book down 1/25,000th in size, and one for the first person who can make an electric motor smaller than a cube 1/64th of an inch on a side.
One year later, William McClellan, a Caltech grad student, claimed the prize for the motor, which is now kept at the Pasadena Museum of History:
William McLellan (1924-2011), a Caltech graduate, spent just 2½ months laboring on the project, using tools such as toothpick and a watchmaker’s lathe. About the size of a speck of sand, it is mounted under a microscope so that you can see the individual parts. Although there is no effective use for the micromotor – McLellan suggested is could be “employed to run the merry-go-round for a flea circus”—the invention is considered a pioneer in the then-novel field of nanotechnology.
You can see a Youtube video of someone attempting to make a modern version of this motor here.
California CEQA rollback
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the law which requires involved and time-consuming environmental studies for any major federal government action (and which allows people to sue projects if they believe the environmental study was insufficiently thorough). For folks interested in making it easier for things to be built in the US, it’s a frequent target of reform.
But in addition to NEPA (which only applies to federal actions), many individual states often have their own versions of NEPA. California’s, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is considered especially burdensome: while most NEPA-like laws only require governments consider the effects on the environment of a given action, CEQA requires impacts to be mitigated.
Like NEPA, CEQA is a frequent target of reform for YIMBY folks who want to get more things built. Last week, in a major victory for YIMBYs, many of the requirements for CEQA were significantly relaxed, reducing the environmental study requirements for new housing and the threat of litigation. From the New York Times:
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, that will allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.
Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.
But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.
A good explanation of the two bills, AB 130 and SB 131, can be found at Aleshire and Wydner:
AB 130 exempts certain housing development projects from CEQA if the housing development project meets certain conditions relating to size, density, location, and use, including additional requirements for housing located within 500 feet of a freeway…
SB 131 establishes a new review process for housing projects that meet all but one of the criteria for a CEQA exemption. Under this process, the environmental review, whether an EIR or initial study, is limited to analyzing only the impacts directly related to the single disqualifying condition. It also eliminates the requirement to evaluate project alternatives, cumulative impacts, or growth-inducing effects that are typically part of a full EIR.
Amongst other changes, SB 131 expands CEQA exemptions to cover a broad range of project types. Some include new and existing farmworker housing projects; certain wildfire risk reduction efforts, and nonprofit food banks and pantries…
Volvo electric trucks
I was vaguely familiar with the electric semi truck efforts of companies like Tesla and Nikola, but I haven’t been tracking the efforts of other companies. But the market leader in electric semi trucks is apparently Volvo. Having just delivered their 5000th truck, Volvo has a 47% marketshare for electric trucks in Europe, and a 40% marketshare in North America. From Electrek:
Volvo Trucks has quietly delivered its 5,000th electric semi truck … and they’re just getting started.
Volvo delivered its first all electric semi truck 2019. Since then, Volvo customers in more than 50 countries around the world have logged more than 100 million miles (170 million km – and almost half of that in the last 14 months as the size of its deployed fleet grows).
Blue Origin vs SpaceX
For years, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been an embarrassing also-ran in the modern space race, wracked by delays as competitor SpaceX puts up achievement after achievement. It wasn’t until early this year, 25 years after founding, that Blue Origin even managed to launch a rocket. But SpaceX entering a rough patch (having lost four Starships this year) has apparently given Blue Origin a chance to catch up, at least for some programs. Via Eric Burger at Ars Technica:
Barring a major setback, it now appears highly likely that Blue Origin will beat SpaceX in landing a vehicle on the lunar surface. Due to the struggles with development of the Starship vehicle—whether on the ground or in space, the last four Starship upper stages have been lost before achieving a nominal success—some industry officials believe Blue Origin now has a realistic chance to compete with SpaceX in the effort to land NASA astronauts on the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.
Both companies are developing large, ambitious vehicles—SpaceX with Starship, and Blue Origin with its MK2 lander—but Blue Origin's vehicle is somewhat less technically challenging. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is also far more committed to a lunar program than SpaceX founder Elon Musk, sources said, and if he sees an opportunity to finally best his rival in space, he may go for it.