Entertailment Page

Entertainment



👁 :330
The Unbreakable Bond
Catagory:Reading
Author:Nick Gardner (How I made my first Million)
Posted Date:05/20/2025
Posted By:utopia online

Peter Bond made his first million dollars selling muck. It was dirty, discarded muck, unwanted because at the time nobody thought you could sell it. But Bond had other ideas. In 1985, the truck driver’s son from Camden, in western Sydney, returned from a couple of weeks’ holiday to find that his partner had shut down their freight business and sold all the gear. Fifteen thousand dollars in debt and with no job, Bond needed an idea fast. He knew his expartner had the contract to remove coal spilled during unloading operations at the Balmain coal loader. He also knew where the coal was dumped. And he had exactly what was needed to turn this dumped filth into a buck: a sharp mind, the capacity for hard yakka, and a rake. Bond, better known today as the founder and majority owner of $1.65 billion alternativeenergy prospect Linc Energy, had found his opportunity. ‘In those days they used to clean up coal from the coal loaders and take it away,’ Bond recalls. ‘They considered it contaminated and wouldn’t load it back onto the ship. My former partner was taking it from the Balmain coal loader and dumping it at a quarry at Kemps Creek.’ So Bond asked the quarry manager if he could take the coal. Unsurprisingly, the manager said yes. Suddenly the broke kid had a product. Now he just needed a market. ‘I knew hospitals used coal,and I knew brick plants used it,’ he says, so he got on the phone. ‘I’m talking to this guy trying to convince him to buy it, and he obviously knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. He basically told me to off and learn the business before I rang him back.’ Bond had a head start, having worked for a couple of years as a trainee metallurgist at BHP’s Port Kembla steelworks. He raked up the muck himself and found he had 1000 tonnes. ‘I figured about 17 bucks a tone would see me clear.’ Finally, he found a buyer. ‘When I got the cheque, I thought, This is the business I want to be in.’ Today that business is like no other. Bond wants to use the gas locked in the vast underground coal seams in Queensland to make super-clean diesel and aviation fuels. Linc Energy is worth more than $1 billion and his personal stake, a fraction over 50 per cent, makes him one of the most successful of the new energy and resources entrepreneurs. When this book went to press, Bond’s demonstration plant at Chinchilla was on the verge of being activated and, if he can get diesel flowing cheaply, efficiently and consistently, then Bond might just become Australia’s richest man. Turning underground coal gas into liquid fuels is a long way from raking up spilled coal.But every good story requires that the hero overcome adversity before he earns his reward. The week Bond was paid for that 1000 tonnes he raked together, the Maritime Services Board put up the Balmain coal-loading contract for tender. Bond bid for it and won, beating all rivals including the erstwhile colleague who’d left him unemployed. It was a start, but it wasn’t long before the young man got his next lesson in business. Some of his clients couldn’t help noticing that their coal-hauler looked as if he lived in his truck. ‘They said, “We love your cheap coal, but can you go and get your own house?”’ he recalls. ‘I was borrowing their front-end loader and borrowing a cup of milk . . . it was secondhand, shoestring stuff. They said, “Can you go and get your own coal yard and actually have a business?”’ Once again, Bond’s talent for seeing value in the discarded came to the fore. That first yard was an abandoned site next to the coal rail depot at Glenleigh, near Camden. The site belonged to the now defunct Clutha coal company. So Bond spoke to someone at Clutha and got the go-ahead to move in. ‘Unbeknown to me, it wasn’t actually their land or their coal, but they’d been asked to get rid of the coal because it was a fire hazard,’ he says. So Bondmade the coal dump his own. ‘That’s where I used to park the truck and screen the coal, and that’s where I made my empire.’ Like the quarry at Kemps Creek, this corner of wasteland was covered with a deep layer of the kind of dross Peter Bond could turn into a quid. ‘They had actually dumped quite a few thousand tonnes of coal there, and it was quite good quality,’ Bond says. ‘I started with a rake in 1985, and by 1989 I was a millionaire.’ But there was no posturing. In fact, Bond let the milestone pass in silence: ‘I paid the house off and the car, and there was money in the bank, but I didn’t even tell my wife.’ Bond decided washing coal was the next step in expanding his business and that the way to do it was with a mobile coal washery, which he says was the first of its kind in Australia. Maybe that’s why it almost sent him broke again. ‘I’d basically bet the million bucks I’d made on it and we were just breaking even,’ Bond says. The problem with breaking even was that he had debt and it was the early 1990s. The credit crisis arrived, complete with double-digit interest rates. It was a period and an experience that permanently coloured Bond’s view of Australian banks. ‘Out of that, I have no loyalty to any bank,’ he says. ‘The only exception, and it’s going to sound strange, was General Electric. I was in debt to GE Money the company’s banking arm], and they were the only ones who stood by me. Each time they refinanced me they did it without kicking me with another $50,000 or whatever. So the biggest and supposedly most brutal bank in the world was in fact the best.’ With the help of the Americans Bond clung on, trying to wring a profit from his coal washeries. Then came the really big break: a telegram from an old mate at BHP. ‘He’d seen an article about my mobile plants,’ Bond says. ‘They signed me up to a contract to wash the coal at Appin colliery, behind Wollongong.’ A year later, Bond and his new business partner were making a couple of million dollars a year in profit. They bought a couple of coal mines, including one for about $3 million that they later sold for many times that sum. But by 2002, Bond had had enough. He sold everything and went and sat on a beach in Fiji. He was seeking enlightenment. For a time he wore a Buddhist monk’s saffron robe, but he drew the line at shaving his head. He listened to self-actualisation gurus like Anthony Robbins. He listened to Donald Trump, too. Back at home, he got the odd phone call. People wanted him to turn assets around. Eventually, someone brought him the Linc story. He discussed it with his wife and she told him to go for it. If all goes well, you can forget about this story. There’ll be a better one about Peter Bond the one about how he made his first billion.


Type:other
👁 :267
The Mysterious City of Rock
Catagory: History
Author:Brian HaughLon((LOST CIVILILATTONS)
Posted Date:05/20/2025
Posted By:utopia online

Hewn out of the solid rock, the ancient ruined city of Petra (the word petra means stone or rock in Greek) lies within a ring of forbidding sandstone mountains in the desert southwest of modern Amman, 50 miles south of the Dead Sea in Jordan. Such is the site's protected position that even today this spectacular complex of temples, tombs, and houses can only be accessed on foot or on horseback. Entrance to Petra is via a dark winding crevice in the rock, known as the siq (cleft in Arabic), which is in places as little as a few feet wide. This great mystery of the desert contains nearly 1,000 monuments, and once possessed fountains, gardens, and a permanent water supply. But why was it carved out of the sandstone in such a secluded, arid location? Who built this majestic city and what happened to its inhabitants? The earliest known population of Petra was a Semitic-speaking tribe known as the Edomites, mentioned in the Bible as descendents of Esau. But it was a culture called the Nabateans who were responsible for most of the incredible architecture at Petra. The Nabateans were of nomadic Arabic origin, but by the fourth century B.C. had begun to settle down in various parts of Palestine and southern Jordan, and around this time they made Petra their capital city. The naturally fortified position of the site on a trade route between Arabian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures allowed the strength of the Nabateans to grow. Gaining control of the caravan route between Arabia and Syria, the Nabateans soon developed a commercial empire that extended as far north as Syria, and the city of Petra became the center for the spice trade. The wealth accumulated by the Nabateans at Petra (through their commercial enterprise) allowed them to build and carve in a style that combined native traditions with Hellenistic (Greek) influence. One of the Nabateans' most oustanding achievements at Petra sprang from necessity. Their city lay on the edge of the parched desert, so a water supply was of prime concern. Consequently, they developed highly sophisticated dams, as well as water conservation and irrigation systems. But the wealth of the Nabateans brought the envy of their neighbors and they were forced to repel several attacks against their capital during the late fourth century B.C., by the Seleucid king Antigonus. The Seleucid Empire was founded in 312 B.C. by Seleucus I, one of Alexander the Great's generals, and included much of the eastern part of Alexander's Empire. In 64-63 B.C., the Nabateans were conquered by the Roman general Pompey, and in A.D. 107, under the Emporer Trajan, the area became part of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea. Despite the conquest, Petra continued to thrive during the Roman period, and various structures, including a vast theater, a colonnaded street, and a Triumphal Arch across the siq, were added to the city. It has been estimated that the population of Petra may have been as great as 20,000 to 30,000 at its height. However, as the importance of the city of Palmyra, in central Syria, grew on a trade route linking Persia, India, China, and the Roman Empire, Petra's commercial activity began to decline. In the fourth century, Petra became part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, but in A.D. 363 the freestanding parts of the city were destroyed in a devastating earthquake, and it is around this time that the Nabateans seem to have left the city. No one is sure exactly why they abandoned the site, but it seems unlikely they deserted their capital because of the earthquake, as very few valuable finds have been unearthed at the site, indicating that their departure was not a sudden one. A further catastrophic earthquake in A.D. 551 practically ruined the city, and by the time of the Muslim conquest in the 7th century A.D., Petra was beginning to slip into obscurity. There was another damaging earthquake in A.D. 747 that further structurally weakened the city, after which there was silence until the early 12th century and the arrival of the Crusaders, who built a small fort inside the city. After the Crusaders left in the 13th century, Petra was left in the hands of sandstorms and floods, which buried a large part of the once great city until even its ruins were forgotten. It was not until 1812 that an AngloSwiss explorer named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered the lost city of Petra and brought it to the attention of the western world. Burckhardt had been travelling in the near east disguised as a Muslim trader (under the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah) in order to acquire knowledge and experience oriental life. While in Elji, a small settlement just outside Petra, Burckhardt heard talk of a lost city hidden in the mountains of Wadi Mousa. Posing as a pilgrim wishing to make a sacrifice at the ancient site, he persuaded two of the Bedouin inhabitants of the village to guide him through the narrow siq. Burckhardt seems only to have managed a brief tour of the remains of Petra, before sacrificing a goat at the foot of the shrine of the prophet Aaron and making his way back to Elji. The explorer did, however manage to produce a map of the ruins and made an entry in his journal to the effect that he had rediscovered Petra.


Type:other
👁 :4
Tesla battery maker sees shares jump in Hong Kong debut
Catagory:News
Author:BBC
Posted Date:05/20/2025
Posted By:utopia online

The world's largest electric vehicle (EV) battery maker has seen its shares jump on their first day of trading in Hong Kong, as it made the biggest initial public offering (IPO) so far this year. China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Limited (CATL) produces more than a third of all EV batteries sold worldwide and supplies major carmakers including Tesla, Volkswagen and Toyota. The listing was closely watched as the US-China tariff war upended the global trading system and hit carmakers hard. In January, the US Department of Defense added the battery maker to a list of businesses it says works with China's military. CATL denies this, claiming its inclusion on the list was a "mistake".


Type:other
👁 :4
Scientists in a race to discover why our Universe exists
Catagory:News
Author:BBC
Posted Date:05/20/2025
Posted By:utopia online

Inside a laboratory nestled above the mist of the forests of South Dakota, scientists are searching for the answer to one of science's biggest questions: why does our Universe exist? They are in a race for the answer with a separate team of Japanese scientists – who are several years ahead. The current theory of how the Universe came into being can't explain the existence of the planets, stars and galaxies we see around us. Both teams are building detectors that study a sub-atomic particle called a neutrino in the hope of finding answers. The US-led international collaboration is hoping the answer lies deep underground, in the aptly named Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune).


Type:other
👁 :2
Stolen Jim Morrison graveside bust found by chance after 37 years
Catagory:News
Author:BBC
Posted Date:05/20/2025
Posted By:utopia online

A memorial bust of American singer Jim Morrison that was stolen from his grave 37 years ago has been found by chance, according to French police. The statue of The Doors frontman was recovered in Paris during an investigation conducted by its financial and anti-corruption arm that was unrelated to the original theft, it said in a post on Instagram. Morrison's grave has long been a site for fans of the rock band to pay their respects in an unusual way - graffiti sprawls across neighbouring gravestones in the poet's corner of the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery, which also houses the tombs of Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde. Little information has been released about the investigation and no suspects have been named in the theft of the statue of the singer, who died in 1971.


Type:other
👁 :360
Learn to come from behind
Catagory:Reading
Author:Chandler, Steve(100 Ways to Motivate Yourself Change Your Life Forever)
Posted Date:05/19/2025
Posted By:utopia online

Progress toward your goals is never going to be a straight line. It will always be a bumpy line. You'll go up and then come down a little. Two steps forward and one step back. There's a good rhythm in that. It is like a dance. There's no rhythm in a straight line upward. However, people get discouraged when they slide a step back after two steps forward. They think they are failing, and that they've lost it. But they have not. They're simply in step with the natural rhythm of progress. Once you understand this rhythm, you can work with it instead of against it. You can plan the step back. In The Power of Optimism, Alan Loy McGinnis identifies the characteristics of tough-minded optimists, and one of the most important is that optimists always plan for renewal. They know in advance that they are going to run out of energy. "In physics," says McGinnis, "the law of entropy says that all systems, left unattended, will run down. Unless new energy is pumped in, the organism will disintegrate. Pessimists don't want to plan for renewal, because they don't think there should have to be any. Pessimists are all-or-nothing thinkers. They're always offended when the world is not perfect. They think taking a step backward means something negative about the whole project. "If this were a good marriage, we wouldn't have to rekindle the romance," a pessimist would say, dismissing the idea of taking a second honeymoon. But an optimist knows that there will be ups and downs. And an optimist isn't scared or discouraged by the downs. In fact, an optimist plans for the downs, and prepares creative ways to deal with them. You can schedule your own comebacks. You can look ahead on your calendar and block out time to refresh and renew and recover. Even if you feel very "up" right now, it's smart to plan for renewal. Schedule your own comeback while you're on top. Build in big periods of time to get away—even to get away from what you love. If you catch yourself thinking that you are too old to do something you want to do, recognize that you are now listening to the pessimistic voice inside of you. It is not the voice of truth. You can talk back. You can remind the voice of all the people in life who have started their lives over again at any age they wanted to. John Housman, the Emmy award-winning actor in The Paper Chase, started acting professionally when he was in his 70s. I had a friend named Art Hill, who spent most of his life in advertising. In his heart, however, he always wanted to be a writer. So in his late 50s, he wrote two books that got published by a small publishing house in Page 81 Michigan. Then, when he was 60 years old, Hill had his first national release with I Don't Care if I Never Come Back, a book about baseball published by Simon and Schuster. The book was a popular and critical success, and his dedication page is something I treasure above any possession I own: "To Steve Chandler—who cared about writing, cared about me, and one day said, 'You should write a book about baseball.' " Nobody cares how old you are but you. People only care about what you can do, and you can do anything you want, at any age. Dr. Monte Buchsbaum of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has been one of many scientists conducting research into the effects of aging on the brain. He is finding that it isn't aging that causes a brain to become less sharp, it's simply lack of use. "The good news is that there isn't much difference between a 25-year-old brain and a 75-year-old brain," said Buchsbaum, who used his positron emission tomography laboratory to scan the brains of more than 50 normal volunteers who ranged in age from 20 to 87. The memory loss and mental passivity that we used to believe was caused by aging has now been proven to be caused by simple lack of use. The brain is like the muscle in your arm: When you use it, it gets strong and quick. When you don't, it grows weak and slow. Research at the UCLA Brain Research Institute shows that the circuitry of the brain—the dendrites that branch between cells—grows with mental activity. "Anything that's intellectually challenging," said Arnold Scheibel, head of the Institute, "can probably serve as a kind of stimulus for dendritic growth, which means it adds to the computational reserves in the brain." Translation: You can make yourself smarter. "Whoever told you that you cannot increase your intelligence?" asks Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart. "Whoever taught you not to try? They didn't know. Flex your mind. Develop it. Use it. It will enrich you and bring you the love of life that thrives on truth and understanding." Research shows that mathematicians live longer than people in any other profession do, and we never used to know why. Now, in further studies done at UCLA, there has been a direct connection established between dendrite growth and longevity. Mental activity keeps you alive. Lose your mental challenges, and life itself fades away. Don't listen to the voice inside that talks about your age, or your IQ, or your life history, or anything it can slow you down with. Don't be seduced. You can start a highly motivated life right now by increasing the challenges you give your brain.


Type:other
👁 :406
Christopher Columbus
Catagory:Biography
Author:LARRY ANDERSON
Posted Date:05/19/2025
Posted By:utopia online

As a sailor, sea captain, trader, and explorer, what Christopher Columbus lacked in navigation tools, he made up for with courage,daring, and perseverance as he headed straight west across an unknown ocean. A lot of people think that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. However, by the time he made his first voyage, in 1492, aboriginal peoples had been living in North America for tens of thousands of years. Even the Vikings, who were also Europeans, had landed in Canada hundreds of years before Columbus was born. Furthermore, Columbus himself never actually set foot on mainland North America, but landed in the Caribbean Islands. Overall, Columbus was wrong about where he was going (Asia), how long the journey was (he thought it was 3,700 km, but it was more than 19,000 km), and where he landed (aboriginal American people became known as “Indians” because Columbus thought he had landed in India). So, why is Columbus the most famous explorer of all time? Partly because what Columbus accomplished was amazing for the time. In those days, Europeans trading with Asia had to sail all the way south around the tip of Africa, then east across the Indian Ocean. Columbus had the daring idea to take a short cut - straight west across the empty ocean, into the complete unknown. It took tremendous determination for a man who was known as a trader - not an explorer to get backing for his plan to sail around the world. The experts said it couldn’t be done. One country after another turned him down until, after years of effort, Columbus finally got the king and queen of Spain to give him the money, ships, and sailors he needed. For Columbus to sail further out of sight of land than anyone ever had done before, trusting in his own calculations and abilities, took a lot of courage. And he would need all of his seafaring abilities to find a safe route home again, using the Trade Winds that blow east across the Atlantic Ocean. While Columbus remained convinced to his death that he had found a route to India, his voyages changed the course of history. Even with all his mixups, Columbus brought back to Europe the news of amazing new lands and peoples. His discovery was the start of a huge movement of Europeans who came to North, Central, and South America to explore, trade, conquer, and occupy. Ultimately, Columbus’s adventuring meant that many changes would take place in the Americas. Whether you believe those changes were good, bad, or a mix of the two, there can be no doubt that Christopher Columbus altered the world through his vision and determination.


Type:other
👁 :266
THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE
Catagory:Reading
Author:Charles Duhigg(The Power of Habit)
Posted Date:05/17/2025
Posted By:utopia online

You Can’t Extinguish a Bad Habit, You Can Only Change It. HOW IT WORKS: USE THE SAME CUE. PROVIDE THE SAME REWARD. CHANGE THE ROUTINE. Dungy’s system would eventually turn the Bucs into one of the league’s winningest teams. He would become the only coach in NFL history to reach the play-offs in ten consecutive years, the first African American coach to win a Super Bowl, and one of the most respected figures in professional athletics. His coaching techniques would spread throughout the league and all of sports. His approach would help illuminate how to remake the habits in anyone’s life. But all of that would come later. Today, in San Diego, Dungy just wanted to win.From the sidelines, Dungy looks up at the clock: 8:19 remaining. The Bucs have been behind all game and have squandered opportunity after opportunity, in typical fashion. If their defense doesn’t make something happen right now, this game will effectively be over. San Diego has the ball on their own twenty-yard line, and the Chargers’ quarterback, Stan Humphries, is preparing to lead a drive that, he hopes, will put the game away. The play clock begins, and Humphries is poised to take the snap. But Dungy isn’t looking at Humphries. Instead, he’s watching his own players align into a formation they have spent months perfecting. Traditionally, football is a game of feints and counterfeints, trick plays and misdirection. Coaches with the thickest playbooks and most complicated schemes usually win.Dungy, however, has taken the opposite approach. He isn’t interested in complication or obfuscation. When Dungy’s defensive players line up, it is obvious to everyone exactly which play they are going to use. Dungy has opted for this approach because, in theory, he doesn’t need misdirection. He simply needs his team to be faster than everyone else. In football, milliseconds matter. So instead of teaching his players hundreds of formations, he has taught them only a handful, but they have practiced over and over until the behaviors are automatic. When his strategy works, his players can move with a speed that is impossible to overcome.3.6 But only when it works. If his players think too much or hesitate or secondguess their instincts, the system falls apart. And so far, Dungy’s players have been a mess.This time, however, as the Bucs line up on the twenty-yard line, something is different. Take Regan Upshaw, a Buccaneer defensive end who has settled into a three-point stance on the scrimmage line. Instead of looking up and down the line, trying to absorb as much information as possible, Upshaw is looking only at the cues that Dungy taught him to focus on. First, he glances at the outside foot of the opposite lineman (his toes are back, which means he is preparing to step backward and block while the quarterback passes); next, Upshaw looks at the lineman’s shoulders (rotated slightly inward), and the space between him and the next player (a fraction narrower than expected). Upshaw has practiced how to react to each of these cues so many times that, at this point, he doesn’t have to think about what to do. He just follows his habits. San Diego’s quarterback approaches the line of scrimmage and glances right, then left, barks the count and takes the ball. He drops back five steps and stands tall, swiveling his head, looking for an open receiver. Three seconds have passed since the play started. The stadium’s eyes and the television cameras are on him. So most observers fail to see what’s happening among the Buccaneers. As soon as Humphries took the snap, Upshaw sprang into action. Within the first second of the play, he darted right, across the line of scrimmage, so fast the offensive lineman couldn’t block him. Within the next second, Upshaw ran four more paces downfield, his steps a blur. In the next second, Upshaw moved three strides closer to the quarterback, his path impossible for the offensive lineman to predict. As the play moves into its fourth second, Humphries, the San Diego quarterback, is suddenly exposed. He hesitates, sees Upshaw from the corner of his eye. And that’s when Humphries makes his mistake. He starts thinking. Humphries spots a teammate, a rookie tight end named Brian Roche, twenty yards downfield. There’s another San Diego receiver much closer, waving his arms, calling for the ball. The short pass is the safe choice. Instead, Humphries, under pressure, performs a split-second analysis, cocks his arm, and heaves to Roche.That hurried decision is precisely what Dungy was hoping for. As soon as the ball is in the air, a Buccaneer safety named John Lynch starts moving.Lynch’s job was straightforward: When the play started, he ran to a particular point on the field and waited for his cue. There’s enormous pressure to improvise in this situation. But Dungy has drilled Lynch until his routine is automatic. And as a result, when the ball leaves the quarterback’s hands, Lynch is standing ten yards from Roche, waiting. As the ball spins through the air, Lynch reads his cues the direction of the quarterback’s face mask and hands, the spacing of the receivers—and starts moving before it’s clear where the ball will land. Roche, the San Diego receiver, springs forward, but Lynch cuts around him and intercepts the pass. Before Roche can react, Lynch takes off down the field toward the Chargers’ end zone. The other Buccaneers are perfectly positioned to clear his route. Lynch runs 10, then 15, then 20, then almost 25 yards before he is finally pushed out of bounds. The entire play has taken less than ten seconds.Two minutes later, the Bucs score a touchdown, taking the lead for the first time all game. Five minutes later, they kick a field goal. In between, Dungy’s defense shuts down each of San Diego’s comeback attempts. The Buccaneers win, 25 to 17, one of the biggest upsets of the season.At the end of the game, Lynch and Dungy exit the field together. “It feels like something was different out there,” Lynch says as they walk into the tunnel. “We’re starting to believe,” Dungy replies.


Type:other
Page 5 of 111