Storm Drain Art from Brazil at design site Toxel.com

It's Bilderberger time again: As The Times (U.K)., put it (Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece -- and here's their address),

Don't tell anyone, don't breathe a word, but the world's most powerful men are meeting secretly again to save the planet from economic catastrophe. Oh, and their address, should you want to send them your opinions, is: c/o Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel, Apollonos Avenue 40, 16671 Vouliagmeni, Greece.

But it's the Guardian that's got the daily scoop, via Charlie Skelton's Bilderberg files. Read these from the bottom.

Seeing without believing: Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest winners were announced, and The break of the curveball took first prize.

Easy home solar... soon: An Ikea for Solar? at GreenTechSolar. No details, not available yet, but... I want some:

Armageddon Energy has come up with a framing system and a lightweight solar panel that, effectively, can pretty much go straight from a few cardboard boxes to your roof, sort of like furniture from Ikea.

A single solar "clover" from Armageddon consists of a triangular frame, a micro-inverter and three lightweight silicon hexagonal solar panels. A single can put out 400 watts. A few Tab A into Slot Bs and it's complete. Three on the roof together can provide a house with a kilowatt of power, says Armageddon CEO Mark Goldman.

CleanTechnica notes (The Next Generation of Alternative Energy: Plug and Play Solar Panels) a $600 solar panel design from Veranda Solar that requires only a screwdriver and a standard home outlet

Thursday's Google fail: Was Google Hacked?

Google News crashed between 8:40 and 9:55 ET, and millions of people searching for today's top stories had to go elsewhere--even actual news Web sites! Data Center Knowledge writer Rich Miller claims that the outage happened as Google tried to upload YouTube video links to news items.

Google Outage Lesson: Don't Get Stuck in a Cloud. PC World:

Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. The search giant described the situation by using the analogy of a large number of airplanes being rerouted through one airport that was not equipped for a massive influx of traffic. But in Google's case, it wasn't airplanes looking for a place to land; it was cloud-based data trying to stay up in the sky.

The confusion surrounding the issue was evident on Twitter where users quickly used the #googlefail hashtag to get the word out and scream bloody murder. One Tweep, named Leigh said, "the Internet dies without Google." She complained that she couldn't access her bank account online, because the bank needed Google Analytics -- Mountain View's web traffic analysis utility -- to work. "This is made of lame," Leigh said.

NASA
Hubble Telescope aboard the shuttle Atlantis. Click it for the huge version.

Space.com is tracking it the repairs.

Here's the Associated Press's nice package of animation, slideshow, history and images made by the Hubble's camera, Hubble space telescope: A spy on the universe.