The deplorable British policing practice of storing the DNA of suspects who've been exonerated or never even charged has been found to be illegal by a European court, and now the database must be destroyed. Remember the kid who was going home on the tube in 2005 and was mistaken for a subway bomber, taken into custody, apartment raided, all data on his computers copied, and his DNA stored forever -- even though the police admitted it was all a misunderstanding? Well at last his DNA should be removed from the database.

The court said there was a particular risk that innocent people would be stigmatised because they were being treated in the same way as convicted criminals. The judges added that the fact DNA profiles could be used to identify family relationships between individuals, meant its indefinite retention also amounted to an interference with their right to respect for their private lives under the human rights convention.

The case provoked an expression of disappointment from the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the promise that a working party, including senior police officials, will report back to Strasbourg by next March on how the government will comply with the judgement.

"The government mounted a robust defence before the court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice. The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

Christ that Jacqui Smith is a piece of work. Remember, come the next election: a vote for Labour is a vote for the party that thinks 1984 is a manual for statecraft.

17 judges, one ruling - and 857,000 records must be now wiped clear (Thanks, beep1o!)

Smartbolts have little discs in their heads that change color as the right amount of tension is applied to them. I recently installed a child safety gate with a similar mechanism: a red, spongy washer between the bolt and the frame; once the right amount of tension was on the bolt, the washer was squished down so much it disappeared and you could stop tightening.

Unfortunately, a torque-wrench does not measure bolt tension accurately, usually only about +/- 30%, because it does not take friction into account. The friction depends on bolt, nut, washer-material, plating, surface smoothness, machining accuracy, degree of lubrication and the number of times a bolt has been tightened. Fastener manufacturers often provide information for determining torque requirements for tightening various bolts, accounting for friction and other effects. However, in field applications, this information is often not available, practical or administered poorly.

SmartBolts (via Red Ferret)

Instructables user TotusMel made this beautiful tatted mask from a pattern of her own devising. I love the lacy severity of it all!

Tatted Mask (via Craft)

Designer Richard Howe worked for two years to photograph all 11,000+ street corners in Manhattan:

The Manhattan Street Corners is my working title for a project to produce a comprehensive photographic portrait of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan. Between March and November, 2006, I systematically photographed each and every one of the island’s roughly 11,000 street corners (the exact number is a matter of definition and, in some ambiguous instances, even a matter of judgment).

The Manhattan Street Corners (via Kottke)

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper avoided being kicked out by the elected representatives of the majority of Canadians -- he asked the Governor General to let him shut down Parliament for two months. So it was inevitable that someone would violate Godwin's law and post a Stephen Harper/Hitler remix of "Downfall (Der Untergang)" -- the infamous, infinitely remixable clip that's been used to parody every subject under the sun.

The Harper Dictatorship (via Mighty God King

Otto the Octopus, a resident of Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, is bored because the aquarium's closed for the winter -- so he's making mischief. First he squirted an overhead light until it shorted out, and now he's taken to juggling the hermit crabs.

"Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants."

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: EUROPICS)

My fall class at ITP has been tracking the creation and distribution of video produced by people other than political professionals, and I wanted to share some of the things they found here. The story of 'Obama <3s teh internet <3s Obama' has been told many times; less well appreciated is the effective Republican/Conservative use of video.

There is a certain (inevitable/dangerous) triumphalism in the Democratic win, because losers always take better lessons from the battlefield than winners. (It's hard to remember now, but before the 2004 election, much the political conversation was around describing the dominance of the warbloggers.)

Looking at Republican uses of video that my students analyzed was quite instructive in this light, because a) those strategies weren't just weak mirrors of the Democratic camp, they were strong but different ones and b) these strategies are going to become much stronger in 2010 and then again in 2012. I'll point to a few of these examples while I'm guest blogging.

First up, and my vote for the single most affecting video of the election, is Dear Mr. Obama, above. I am an anti-Iraq-war Democrat, and it nevertheless brought tears to my eyes (and I don't cry easy -- will.i.am's Yes We Can left me fairly cold.) Watch it all the way through, or, if you can't, skip to the end before you close it.

This is a video made by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Stuff like the American flag draped just in frame looks hokey to the godless/ sodomite/ baby-killing wing of the Democratic party (my people), but is part of a "plain speaking and right thinking" package that clearly hit just right with the target audience. It was seen 13 million times in 3 months, which topped Obama Girl in absolute views, and I've got a Crush...on Obama was up a year and a half.

This is why this video is really really important: the simple message and Blair Witch production values (good enough to be effective, bad enough to seem unplanned) made this video like Democratic kryptonite. The video was largely circulated via homophilous forwarding along conservative channels. Despite the incredible viewership, I'm betting that the ratio of BoingBoing readers who have seen Obama Girl to those who've seen Dear Mr. Obama is at least 10:1. (When my students presented it to ~100 NYU students on election eve, something like 3 of them had seen it.)

The lovely non-partisan view of voting -- make your case to everyone, see what happens on election day -- masks the fact that there are really three different voter games being played in elections. The first is 'Mobilize the base' -- at ~50% voter participation, there's a lot of juice in just being able to get people who want you to win out to actually get to the polls. The second game is 'Swing the undecided.' There is, to a first approximation, no such thing as an 'independent' voter. People who don't make up their minds until late in an election are less political, less involved in the issues, and less likely to vote overall than partisans, so their minds have to be changed with something emotionally engaging. And the third game is 'Depress the turnout of your opponent' or, at the very least, to avoid enraging them to the point that they are willing to do something rash, like vote.

And in that regard, Dear Mr. Obama was a trifecta. For the base, a muscular but polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight. For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them than argumentation. And for the Dems -- nothing. The video might as well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since the video's sole speaker can't be criticized without making the criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked to it, talked about it.

For most of the life of the Republic, it was not just possible but imperative to say different things in different places -- what politician would tell auto workers and orange pickers the same thing! That old world had a stake driven through its heart by the Macaca Moment; every politician knows that anything they say to anyone, they say to everyone everywhere.

Now, the job of saying one thing to one group, and something different to another, falls to the supporters. The social solidarity of weblogs and mailing lists replaces the old world of media buys and Chamber of Commerce speeches, recreating through the echo chamber what was once the province of geography and cost. Dear Mr. Obama was music to Republican ears while being inert in Democratic hands; expect it to be a template for 2010.

As previously mentioned, today Offworld moved just a little closer to that long-stated goal of bringing in more influence from outside the games industry proper with its first new feature from Ignatz Award winning and Eisner nominated comic artist James Kochalka, who will be creating new monstrous Miis for the site which you can bring home to your own Wii.

We also saw that Rock Band is about to get a little bit country, made a plea for more developers to praise rather than scold their players, found new iPhone games based on bondage and argument-settling by music, and saw Sega racing classic Outrun re-made for Nintendo's Virtual Boy.

Finally, we saw a very Weezer Christmas coming to iPhone and a Sega Master System's circuits bent to create real-time guitar effects, got jealous over a fantastic scheme to bring freelance illustrator work into LittleBigPlanet, and got ready to take a ride on the Raptor Copter, a brilliant looking and literally-named new iPhone game.

Love the little adventure dudes on the ends of these teabags, custom designed for a posh cafe in Istanbul.

Activitea... (see what I did there)