Good morning, Whitewater.
Midweek in the Whippet City will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
So what’s it like inside our planet? Talk Nerdy to Me has the answer:
On this day in 1931, America’s first cloverleaf hits a magazine cover:
The first cloverleaf interchange to be built in the United States, at the junction of NJ Rt. 25 (now U.S. Rt. 1) and NJ Rt. 4 (now NJ Rt. 35) in Woodbridge, New Jersey, is featured on the cover of this week’s issue of the Engineering News-Record. (By contrast, a piece on the under-construction Hoover Dam was relegated to the journal’s back pages.)
With their four circular ramps, cloverleaf interchanges were designed to let motorists merge from one road to another without braking. They worked well enough—and became so ubiquitous as a result—that writer Lewis Mumford once declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.” But many of the older cloverleaves were not built to handle the volume and speed of traffic they now receive, and many have been demolished and rebuilt.
For more on the history of the Woodbridge Cloverleaf, see A Cloverleaf That Made History Will Soon Be History Itself (after modifications in the interchange’s shape). There’s also a thirty-minute video entitled – really – The Woodbridge Cloverleaf: Onramps to Innovation that describes the interchange.
On this day in 1838, Wisconsin’s territorial legislature first meets in Madison:
On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City. Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished. On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government. [Source: Wiskonsan Enquirer, Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, 1838]
Google-a-Day asks a question of science and politics:
What cabinet position had been held by the head of the commission that investigated the STS-51L disaster?