Spanish Museum Relies On Robot To Catch Cracks In Artwork

I spy with my little eye, a crack in a Renaissance masterpiece! Well, that particular "job" has fallen onto the shoulders of a robot now, at least at Madrid's Reina Sofia museum in Spain. A huge robot will scan a painting of a masterpiece, where it will do so in an extremely slow process since it has to snap hundreds of microscopic shots via the use of infrared and ultraviolet photography. This particular robot will allow restorers to check out cracks, scratches and creases which are difficult to see at times with the naked eye, in addition to underlying preparatory sketches and other touch-ups. This unique robot has been given the nickname "Pablito", and that is because its first work involved Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" canvas that showcased the resulting carnage of the Spanish Civil War.

Pablito is no graceful robot, as it measures a whopping 9 meters long and 3.5 meters high, tipping the scales at approximately 1,200kg when fully assembled. In fact, its work on Guernica involved snapping 22,000 or so photos, so good luck trying to pore through all of that! You might expect a book with the title Sad Robot Stories to make you laugh. Sure, a robot with human emotions is nothing new. But wouldn't it be kind of funny if C3PO sang the blues? You know, if his verses were written by, say, Mason Johnson, one of the Chicago writers most likely to make me ROTFLMAO? This was my thinking, and if you're anything like me, you're already hunting-and-pecking your way through this review to find a release date and some purchasing information.

Turns out, though, in Mason Johnson's Sad Robot Stories, a fictional novella rather than a blues song, we see that there's a great deal more than laughter to be found in the woes of a machine.The title character of this book is Robot with a capital R, and he's sad because there are no more people on Earth. Some unnamed cataclysmic event wiped us all out. "Even the minute sound of blood rushing through veins and arteries, speeding through the heart and up to the brain--which sounded to Robot's technologically advanced thingymajigs like a warehouse filled with porcelain toilets constantly being flushed--was gone. Robot missed the toilet sound that was the human race." He means this in the nicest way possible.