About three weeks ago, I was driving north on 101 to work at PBwiki.  There was a van driving by and I saw what looked like a large black cargo container on it.  Except it had a large cylinder on top.  It looked like a GIANT CAMERA mounted on the roof, aimed at the sky.  I thought, "Yeah, Brian, It's a giant camera on top of a van."

Now I just saw William's photos of the Google van.  LOL.  Turns out the thing on top was a camera after all.  Well, a panoramic assembly of normal-sized cameras arranged in a shape that just so happens to look like a giant camera.  Is this an engineering joke on behalf of Google?  Or maybe it is a disguise: "Nobody will think were hiding cameras in 60x-sized replica of a camera."