M-6 is a 19.7-mile (31.7 km) freeway that serves portions of southern
Kent and eastern Ottawa counties south of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Initially opened to traffic on November 20, 2001, the roadway connects
Interstate 196 on the west with Interstate 96 on the east while running
through several townships on the south side of the Grand Rapids
metropolitan area. Each end is in a rural area while the central
section has suburban development along the highway. The freeway was
originally conceived in the 1960s, and it took 32 years to approve,
plan, finance, and build M-6 from the time that the state first
authorized funding in 1972 to the time the full highway opened to
traffic in 2004. Initial construction started in November 1997, with
the first phase opened in 2001 and the remainder in November 2004. The
project was built with two firsts: the first single-point urban
interchange in the state, and a new technique to apply the pavement
markings, embedding them into the concrete to reduce the chance of a
snowplow scraping them off.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-6_%28Michigan_highway%29>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
284:
Diocletian became Roman Emperor, eventually establishing reforms that
brought an end to the Crisis of the Third Century.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian>
1695:
Zumbi, the last of the leaders of Quilombo dos Palmares in early
Brazil, was executed.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumbi>
1902:
While discussing how to promote the newspaper L'Auto during a lunch
meeting in Paris, sports journalist Henri Desgrange came up with the
idea of holding a cycling race that later became known as the Tour de
France.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France>
1917:
Second World War: The Battle of Cambrai in France began with British
forces having initial success over Germany's Hindenburg Line.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cambrai_%281917%29>
1979:
A group of armed insurgents attacked and took over the Masjid al-Haram
in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, declaring that one of their leaders, Muhammad
bin abd Allah al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of
Islam.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_Seizure>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
Christmas creep (n):
The inexorable tendency for the commercial aspects of Christmas to
appear earlier every year
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Christmas_creep>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having
been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some
enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim
that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained
unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.
--Benoît Mandelbrot
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt_Mandelbrot>