The Thin Yellow Line

As the football season comes to a close (finally), it seems fitting to draw attention to something that most of us barely even notice anymore. I don't watch football that much, but it's even hard for me to imagine life before The Yellow Line. Granted, we are only talking about ten years ago, but it's easy to forget hard times.

For those of you who live in holes (or Detroit), The Yellow Line shows us how far the team has to go to get a first down. Sometimes, there will also be a blue line to show the line of scrimmage, or if it's a fourth down, The Yellow Line will turn red (Danger!). The kicker is that it only shows up on TV. Even though it looks like it's actually there! This is the real reason people use to justify spending hundreds of dollars on high definition televisions as opposed to spending sixty-two dollars (I'm told) on football tickets. It's all because of the yellow line.

The computer system that makes it happen is actually called "1st & Ten" (those graphics nerds are so clever), and was developed by a company called Sportvision. It requires seven computers, five cameras, four people, and a whole bunch of technology that I don't feel like explaining. These people do though, so ask them. Here's a picture just to take up some space. See how The Yellow Line disappears behind the dude with the ball? It's' magical.


The Yellow Line may not make football any more bearable for non-football fans, but that's okay. There's plenty of other stuff to watch on big flat screen tvs. Like Super Bowl commercials.

Because we didn't have enough sheep already...

On July 5, 1996, I was eating a flaming watermelon. Well...not really. It was my brother's eighth birthday, and since he "doesn't like cake" for unknown reasons, we settled on a treat that required minimal effort as far as preparations go (the wax from the candles comes right off). In the height of our sibling rivalry, I wish I had been culturally aware enough to tell him that I was not celebrating his birthday with my enthusiastic watermelon consumption. It was, in fact, a much more important day (and certainly deserving of a slightly richer dessert).

Halfway across the world, in Edinburgh, other people were celebrating a birthday (dancing around in kilts and playing bagpipes, surely). The first cloned mammal, Dolly, had been born! Dolly was a sheep, cloned from a somatic cell of another sheep (quite predictably, also Dolly). It was a cell from a mammary gland, actually, which is why the Scottish people named her Dolly (as in "Dolly Parton sure has giant mammary gland cells!"). Apparently Pamela Anderson hadn't made it into Scottish pop culture yet and they were still listening to music from the late 60s. But you sure can see the resemblance - check it out:



Just kidding. I think.

Anyway, they cloned Dolly by taking the nucleus from the donor cell and implanting it into an unfertilized egg cell (sans its original nucleus). Then they stimulated that cell to divide with an electric shock, and eventually implanted it into a surrogate sheep uterus. Apparently this is a tough process to get right: Dolly was the only survivor of 227 cloning attempts. Oops. The guy whose brainchild (brainlamb?) this was has said that the process will probably never be efficient enough for use in humans. So sad; I was desperately hoping this was an actual possibility.

Dolly lived for six fulfilling years, during which she made six more baby sheep. Her breed is supposed to live for 12 years, but since she was living an extra life, six years of deja vu was probably plenty for her.

After Dolly, a dog named Snuppy (really...?) was successfully cloned in Korea. If dogs and sheep ever become endangered, we'll be able to bring them back, no problem. It's too bad that no one decided to put any serious effort towards cloning a more exciting animal, like a spider monkey or a tasmanian devil. Taxpayers would probably be a little more into the whole cloning thing if we all got to keep genetically identical (and possibly buxom) baby monkeys named Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid.

And in case you were wondering, that sheep picture is actually Dolly. Her remains are on display at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where she spent her whole second life. At least that's where her exterior remains are. Her insides? Probably haggis.