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In 2001, [Hervé] This came up with a formal system of classification for what happens when foods are mixed, baked, whipped, fried, sautéed in lime juice, and so forth. It shows, for example, how the 451 classical French sauces break down into 23 distinct types. More important, the system allows the creation and pairing of billions of novel, potentially tasty dishes.

Aaron Koblin: The Sheep Market is a collection of 10,000 sheep created by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid $.02 (US) to “draw a sheep facing left.”

Utopia is a “digital typeface that portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.

Shipping Containers, 2007. Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours. Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

The Hungarian composer Antal Borsos (1916-1979) was known for works of a traditional nature until the early 1960s, when he began to dabble with the avant garde. He was particularly interested in incorporating organic noises and envisioned a symphony developed from the ‘music’ produced by plants (creaking trees, snapping buds etc). His Fugue in C major (No.50) used a recording he made of rhubarb growing inside metal bins (forced rhubarb famously grows so quickly that it can be heard expanding).

Norway's Princess Martha Louise says she has psychic powers and can teach people to communicate with angels. “It was while I was taking care of the horses that I got in contact with the angels,” she says.

Marimekko fabrics on Thinglink

Building Open Library, we faced a difficult new technical problem. We wanted a database that could hold tens of millions of records, that would allow random users to modify its entries and keep a full history of their changes, and that would hold arbitrary semi-structured data as users added it. Each of these problems had been solved on its own, but nobody had yet built a technology that solved all three together.

When a buyer orders his set of plates he gives his date and place of birth. The buyer’s personal night sky map is then calculated by a custom computer program and printed onto a set of blueprints followed by Nymphenburg’s master porcelain painters. Each set of dinner plates involves the hand-painting of some 500 stars, nebulae, planets and constellations in gold and platinum. Press Release: My Private Sky

A unique work of art, unveiled today, invites viewers to phone a glacier in Iceland - and listen to its death throes, live, through a microphone submerged deep in the bitterly cold lagoon which relays the splashes, creaks and groans as great masses of melting ice sheer off and crash into the water. The Guardian: Callers take part in art

Mended Spiderweb #19 (Laundry Line) Nina Katchadourian: The Mended Spiderweb series