Do or Do Not

level position to the corner office overnight. One must work their way up the ranks until they reach the top. Unfortunately, some doors are closed so tight you can't even get a toe in, let alone a whole foot. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hand. Ends to get noticed, like James Dyson, who was so angry that his vacuum kept breaking, he took it apart to see

how it worked. It turned out that a critical design flaw was the cause of his problems, so he got to work on a new kind of vacuum design, and unlike the other models on the market, his didn't need a bag. Dyson built over five thousand prototypes before finding one that worked, doors were shut in his face, Manufacturers refused to make it, and retailers wouldn't carry it in their stores. It took a long long time before those stores and their customers saw the benefits of a Dyson vacuum,

but once they did, the rest was history. Stewart Freeborn was another person with a dream, one that he was going to make come true, no matter what it took. Born in London in nineteen fourteen, Freeborn was fascinated with makeup,

but not the fashion kind. The idea of dressing up to look like someone or something else fascinated him, and as he got older, he grew into did in the chemistry of different plastics, learning how they were made and how they affected the human skin when applied, and he knew exactly how he wanted to put his experience to use in the movies. Freeborn's father, an insurance broker, begged him to join the family business, but Stewart couldn't shake

his love of movie magic. He even started sneaking onto the lots of shows whenever he was able to, and just like Dyson in his early days, no one was interested. Refusing to give up, Freeborn made a bold move in Nive, he called up the local newspapers and studios to let them know that Highly Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, had arrived in London. Not long after, the Emperor was seen driving around Freeborn's neighborhood, that is, until the police detained him.

Unfortunately for them, all they had caught was an ambitious young makeup artist in a fake beard and nose prosthetic looking for his big break, and his stunt didn't even land him a job. It wasn't until a British director named Alexander Korda took a chance on him, giving Freeborn some work on period dramas being filmed at the time. One of his first major productions was that of a nineteen forty eight adaptation of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

The role of Fagin would be played by Alec Guinness, someone whom Freeborn would work with again on such films as The Bridge Over the River Quai in nineteen fifty seven, as well as a little science fiction film being shot in the Tunessee and Deserts in nineteen seventy seven. In fact, Freeborn was responsible for many of Star Wars colorful characters,

including one fan favorite. In particular, Concept artist Ralph mcquarie had imagined Han Solo's loyal Wookie partner, Chewbacca, as a seven foot tall monster with a misshapen head, yellow eyes, sharp teeth, of vests and boots. Freeborn put his own spin on the character, making him more doglike in appearance and replacing his vest with the bandalier. The result was a gentle giant with an iconic growl who would go on to save the galaxy numerous times. The film's sequel, however,

had a unique problem. A new creature was needed, and it too was required to look unique, something to set it apart from the other characters that Freeborn had designed, and so he turned to two unlikely places from which to draw inspiration. A mirror at a photograph of Albert Einstein. Upon seeing his own reflection, Freeborn noticed the topography of his face, how the lines and bumps told the story. He was older and more experienced than he had been in his youth, and he lost so much of his hair.

As for Einstein, it was his eyes that had captivated the artist the most. They were the eyes of a quiet and wise man, and they were surrounded by Wrinkles. Freeborn combined all the features the creases of his own weathered face with Einstein's sunken eyes to create one of the most recognizable characters in the entire Star Wars universe, the two foot tall Jedi master Yoda. The funny thing about technology is that not only is it constantly changing,

it's changing us as well. How we work and the way we think are ever evolving thanks to Breakthrough is happening every day. Telephones used to be bound to wires in our homes and offices. As satellites and wireless technology spread across the world, landlines gave way to cell phones. Today, the devices we carry in our pockets are no longer used only for voice communication. We record our lives using their built in cameras. We can look up any fact on the Internet, or post our every thought in two

hundred and forty characters or less. In other words, we've come a long way today. We're the ones doing the changing. The more we share about our lives, the more selfies we post and ads we pick up on, the more our technology learns about us, our behavior, years are buying habits, even what we look like. This information can be used to influence the things we purchase or make it easy for governments to track us down. But for Hasashi Canby,

it made it easier to identify pastries. Cambay founded Brain Company Ltd. In n after spending several years designing computerized graphics systems. His work could be seen on nightly news programs displaying baseball scores and monetary exchange rates. From there, Camba moved on to digitizing the textile industry. He replaced the handwritten card system that had been used to program looms with an automated computer program. This resulted in fewer

mistakes and less wasted fabric. As the years progressed, Brain continued to innovate with applications for bridge engineers, students, and other kinds of textile manufacturers. But it was in two thousand seven when everything changed. A restaurant chain was about to venture into the baking business, and if it wanted to compete, it had to offer a wide variety of pastries. Now, in America, a bakery might sell a handful of different kinds of cookies, cakes, and other goods. In Japan, though,

the most successful pastry shops sold hundreds of varieties. Unfortunately, that success came with complication. Most items were sold without wrappers or bar codes, meaning cashiers had to memorize the look and price of each pastry. They also had to handle each individual item, and this process led along lines and contamination by the cashiers. There had to be a better way, and the Brain Company was going to find it. They got to work on an artificial intelligence program to

assist in identifying pastries on a conveyor belt. It used multiple algorithms to detect the features of different kinds of baked goods, something they referred to as computer vision, but it was a tough task. For example, a croissant might not always be crescent shaped, and some pastries looked just like others in shape and size, the only difference being

their fillings or if they had sugar on top. Can bas team kept working, though, even as the two thousand eight financial crisis threatened to shut them down for good, and as other projects lost funding due to budget cuts. He poured one percent of his remaining resources into the pastry project. Brain rewrote its algorithms, weaving them together with

complicated camera systems and lights. They also accounted for variations like if a doughnut got split in half on the conveyor belt, with the program know that two pieces were meant to go together, or if multiple items were touching, would it understand that they weren't. One giant pastry can based team had it covered. By the time they were finished, the Bakery Scan platform was able to recognize dozens of varieties of pastries with ninety eight percent accuracy, and it

was always learning too. The more the cashiers helped in identifying questionable scans at the checkout line, the better the program got it recognizing them the next time around. Bakery Scan was a breakthrough, but it was only the beginning. Another challenge was on the horizon, and it was about to take Cambay's brain from the conveyor belt to the oncology ward you see. Ten years after bakery Scans inception, a doctor at Kyoto's Louis Pasture Center for Medical Research

saw a story about it on the news. The concept intrigued him as someone who spent years looking at cancer cells up close, because under the microscope they kind of looked like bread, and he wondered if Canby's technology could be used outside of the bakery and inside his research facility. So Brain modified the algorithms, and with the little engineering, the new platform dubbed AI scan could now detect a single cancer cell among a microscope slide full of other

healthier cells with accuracy. Today, this AI tech is being used across all sorts of different industries like automotive and even jet engineering, and it's still saving lives in the medical field too, all thanks to a complicated request from a bakery. And I think the big your lesson here speaks for itself. Don't ever let people tell you that pastries aren't good for you. I hope you've enjoyed today's

guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye