Man, a long week.  Many meetings and many meals, some of them excellent :)  Okay onward into the weekend, but first a quick filter pass...

Jason Kottke notes Einstein's amazing year of 1905: "In 1905, Einstein came up with the concept of special relativity, published his paper on the photoelectric effect, finished his doctoral dissertation, devised the E=mc^2 concept, published a paper on Brownian motion, was approved for his doctorate, and turned 26."  Yeah, so what have you been up to? 

A rather spectacular "deep zoom" into the Mandelbrot set.  Wow.  Every time you see something like this, you're struck anew by the extreme awesomeness of this mathematical object.  Pure cool. 

A nighttime launch of the space shuttle, captured on film by nomadic amateurs.  Amazing.  (Although I must say, this video cleanly violates the inverted pyramid rule :)  Weird to think that we aren't going to have any more shuttle launches, what will take their place?  Oh yeah... 

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is ready for takeoff at Cape Kennedy.  A very cool photo sequence.  Can't wait for the inaugural flight! 

One last hurrah for the shuttle: the Endeavor shows the "Millennium Falcon" view of Earth, wow.  Check out the whole slide show, rather amazing sequence.  Almost expect to see Chewy in this picture, don't we? 

Dave Winer: What's wrong with Google Buzz.  Just about everything seems to be wrong with it; hard to read anything nice.  Seems they misfired pretty badly with this product. 

Oh, and he's actually posted morning coffee notes!  Yay.  Noted by me while drinking my morning coffee :)  I think my blogging style owes much to Dave's...  he was one of the first bloggers I truly read every day, back in the day.

Tim Bray: The Listening Engine.  Aka why "normal" people will never use Twitter, or RSS, or whatever...  "the Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed."  I so choose.  And additionally the net has all sorts of curators, including bloggers...  including me! 

Guess what this is?  The Nissan Juke.  Could be the ugliest car ever, amid heavy competition...  is it really that hard to build a nice looking car?  Apparently.  Wow. 

Did you mark it?  Last Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of a watershed event, in which an IBM computer named Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.  I remember it well.  It seems rather quaint now but at the time the fact that a computer could beat a human at chess seemed important.  Today I think your phone can beat most grand masters :) 

Wrapping up, my friend Gary sent this link to Procol Harem playing Whiter Shade of Pale, a real blast from the past.  Early early Robin Trower.  Excellent! 

We skipped the light fandango...

(At this point the song reminds me strongly of The Big Chill - remember that?  Great movie...)