Jottings from the Granite Studio

Just what I need, another way to kill a whole morning of productivity.  As if the Red Sox being in the playoffs hasn’t been sufficiently destructive to my schedule, IBM, in partnership with the Palace Museum in Beijing, has unveiled an interactive virtual Forbidden City.  I have only begun venturing through this online educational tool/video game and I’ll give it a fuller review later.  In the meantime, if you wish to engage in some ‘time theft’ from your company whilst you should be working, I highly recommend checking it out.

More from the world of virtual tours, the British Library has a website in conjunction with its exhibition ”Trading Places – the East India Company and Asia 1600-1834.” You can check out their China section, or get a taste for the whole site from tea to opium, Calcutta to Canton.  I particularly enjoyed this little nugget from the section on opium, summed up in classic British understatement: “Ethical trading it was not.”