The Picts were an ancient people from Scotland, and key in their royal and religious ceremonies were wooden thrones. While stone carvings depicting these thrones survive, none of the actual wooden examples do, so the National Museum of Scotland has taken part in a reconstruction. A year of work went into fashioning one, as part of a larger project sponsored by a Scottish whiskey company. The Scotsman has a picture - although there is a researcher sitting in it obscuring the view - and more detail on the source material.

The latest on the list of books I really hope get an English translation (or books which I ought to redo my French for) is 'Petit Inventaire des Citations Malmenées' by Desalmand and Stalloni. This translates as 'Little Inventory of Mishandled Quotations' and is a myth busting listing of phrases which weren't actually said by the person famous for doing so. A blog on the Times has plenty of examples, such as "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver", usually attributed to Goering, but actually from a 1933 play by Hanns Johst (although he was still pro Nazi). The examples seem to suggest that European, and lots of French, phrases are corrected.

Britain's Aerial Reconnaissance Archive, known as TARA, has placed online substantial numbers of aerial photographs taken during and after World War 2. I've had a little go on their website, which allows you to browse by location, and found the Normandy area has a good group of pictures. Of course, this is a specialized site and a lot of the pictures are fields and bombed out urban landscapes, so you might want to just look at this slideshow, which has been collected together by the Guardian newspaper and includes D-Day landing craft disgorging forces.

Diary entries tracing the final expedition of British Antarctic explorer Captain Scott will be published online using twitter and a blog. I won't tell you exactly what happens, but it's worth investing the year and a half reading them to trace the journey, now an essential part of British historical lore. The project is being carried out by the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, but I don't know why they didn't wait another year and start on November 26th 2010, for the hundredth anniversary of the trip. The diary will be supplemented by other documents, and the tweets seem to be just teasing journal entries.