This week’s catch — the shortlisted finds still waiting on a theme: a working search box in front of a billion Usenet posts going back to 1981; the fact that the NATO phonetic alphabet is neither phonetic nor NATO’s; a software engineer’s résumé scattered through a level of Halo 3; five hundred square miles of basalt with three hundred lakes on top of it; five minutes of stone, wood and water animated exactly where they lay; an antique sewing machine wired to play a synthesiser one stitch at a time; and John Wilson making a film about concrete using a formula he learned at a Hallmark movie workshop.