TurkmenPost

LONDON (AFP) - Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and Russian businessman Roman Abramovich come first and second in a newspaper’s list of the richest people living in Britain.

Mittal is worth 13.2 billion pounds (19.5 billion euros, 25.9 billion dollars), while Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, has 10.8 billion pounds, up from 7.5 billion last year, the Sunday Times Rich List showed Wednesday.

The list shows that the combined wealth of those on the list has shot up in the last year — it is now 406 billion pounds, up over 18 percent from 343 billion pounds last year.

The benchmark for entering the top 5,000 is five and a half million pounds.

Other notable figures on the list include footballer David and Victoria Beckham, with a combined wealth of 87 million pounds, while Beatles legend Sir
Paul McCartney is worth 825 million pounds.

But list compilers warn he could fall out of the top 100 for the first time if he loses up to 200 million pounds in a divorce battle with estranged wife Heather Mills McCartney, as some pundits have predicted.

A Norwegian businessman is looking to earn money on the fat of the land, and create fuel in the USA.

Lauri Venøy wants to use the product created from liposuction to develop bio-diesel.

Bio-diesel can be produced from plant oils and/or animal fat, and the Norwegian sees the scheme as a renewable energy source, newspaper Dagens Nærinsgliv reports.

More than sixty percent of Americans are overweight and the Norwegian’s firm in Miami, Florida is in the process of signing an agreement with US hospital giant Jackson Memorial. This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel.

"Maybe we should urge people to eat more so we can create more raw material for fuel," Venøy said.

In Norway bio-diesel is primarily produced from fish oils and used fryer fat.

via aftenposten.

In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.

A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.

Mr. Kramnik fell behind in the match when he lost Game 2 by walking into a checkmate in one move with hardly any pieces remaining on the board, a mistake that ranks as one of the biggest in championship-level chess history. Needing a win today to tie the match, Mr. Kramnik took some chances, eventually lost a pawn, and was then outmaneuvered by the computer.

The match, which began Nov. 25, was played in the National Art Gallery in Bonn, Germany, and was sponsored by the RAG Group, a German industrial conglomerate based in Essen. According to RAG, Mr. Kramnik would have been paid $1 million if he had won; reports in the chess press said that he would receive half that amount as an appearance fee if he lost.

The match was the second that a world chess champion has lost to a computer. In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost a six-game match to Deep Blue, a dedicated chess computer created by I.B.M.

Since then, Mr. Kasparov drew a match in 2003 against Deep Junior, a program developed in Israel, and Mr. Kramnik drew a match in 2002 against an earlier version of Deep Fritz.

Today’s outcome may end the interest in future chess matches between human champions and computers, according to Monty Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill University in Montreal. Professor Newborn, who helped organize the match between Mr. Kasparov and Deep Blue, said of future matches: “I don’t know what one could get out of it at this point. The science is done.”

Mr. Newborn said that the development of chess computers had been useful.

“If you look back 50 years, that was one thing we thought they couldn’t do,” he said. “It is one little step, that’s all, in the most exciting problem of what can’t computers do that we can do.”

Speculating about where research might go next, Mr. Newborn said, “If you are interested in programming computers so that they compete in games, the two interesting ones are poker and go. That is where the action is.”

via NYTIMES.

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via egotastic.

Playgrounds in America might never be the same: Paris Hilton says she wants to have children — soon.

The partying heiress says that hanging around with her new best friend, Britney Spears, and Spears’ two tykes has made her want to reproduce.

“It’s been my dream to have four babies by 30,” the 25-year-old heiress announced, reports Life & Style Weekly. And Hilton thinks she’s highly qualified for motherhood, explaining: “I look after animals, so I’d have a lot to give my kids.”

In fact, looking after kiddies has become so appealing to Hilton that she recently cut short a night out with Spears, announcing to friends, “We’re going home to the babies. We miss them.”

Source.