There are many cases in sports where accidents cause unintentional injury. Two good examples:

1) What happens when you get hit in the head by a 95 MPH fastball?

2) The Felipe Massa crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix

We try to prevent these accidents as best we can. Batters wear helmets. Cars are improved with new safety devices, and so on.

But then there are the injuries caused by violence, where players ruthlessly and willfully attact others with the intent to cause injury. One example from a couple of months ago comes to mind:

A huge hockey hit leads to a concussion

And then there is this story/video, where a female soccer player named Elizabeth Lambert is clearly out of control and savaging other players on the field:

VIDEO: Watch Elizabeth Lambert, The Dirtiest Player In Women’s Soccer

I do not know the answer to this question: Why do human beings allow this kind of violence? Nothing is gained from it. Truly talented athletes are rare, and allowing them to be injured by rogue players takes them out of the game, and therefore diminishes the game for everyone. Why aren’t violent players immediately and permanently suspended from the sport? In the case of Elizabeth Lambert, why hasn’t she been arrested and put in jail?

The Myth, the Math, the Sex – “One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct…”

Software Listens for Hints of Depression – “It’s a common complaint in any communication breakdown: “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” For professor Sandy Pentland and his group at MIT’s Media Lab, the tone and pitch of a person’s voice, the length and frequency of pauses and speed of speech can reveal much about his or her mood…”

The Physics of Bras – “Overcoming Newton’s second law with better bra technology…”

Tomorrow’s weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals – “Now an international team of researchers analysing signals from satellites, aircraft and ground-based stations have found clear evidence that Richardson’s intuition was right and that the complexity of the atmosphere could really be an illusion….”

Inside the Motorola Droid, an iPhone likeness – “Though the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone have different chassis, their high-octane engines are similar…”

Hubble’s New Camera Delivers Another Stunner – “The Hubble Space Telescope’s new camera is returning incredibly detailed, stunning images of space. This close-up view of an area near the core of the iconic Southern Pinwheel galaxy, or M83, shows very rapid star birth…”

Ukraine epidemic kills 109 – “A total of 763,000 people have fallen ill with flu and acute respiratory infections in the epidemic in recent weeks, with 34,000 of them hospitalised, the country’s top sanitary doctor Olexander Bilovol told reporters. He said 109 people had died, up from the previous toll of 95 deaths announced on Thursday…”

Gene Therapy Arrests ALD Progression – “In what appears to be a first, European researchers have used gene therapy to arrest the progress of X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, a fatal brain disease. In two 7-year-old boys, the gene therapy — using a viral vector derived from HIV — stopped the progressive demyelination characteristic of the disease, Patrick Aubourg, MD, of University Paris-Descartes and colleagues reported in the Nov. 6 issue of Science…”

Following Benford’s Law, or Looking Out for No. 1 – “Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students’ amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses…”

Desiree Jennings “cured” of her “vaccine-induced dystonia”? – “You remember Desiree Jennings? She’s the young woman who received a seasonal flu vaccine in August and later developed what is being represented as dystonia but is almost certainly not. The other day, her VAERS database report was found, which casts even more doubt on her story, given that the neurologist who examined her when she presented concluded that there was a strong psychogenic component to whatever it was that was wrong with her…” From mid-October:

The OpenOffice Mouse – “In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface for OpenOffice.org applications such as Writer and Calc than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit…” Photos here: OpenOffice Introduces Multi-Button Confusion With New Mouse

Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers’ Big Problem: Energy – “The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity…”

First Look at Carbon Capture and Storage in a West Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant – “And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO2 billowing from its stack is being captured in an industrial unit rising from the concrete in its shadow and then pumped underground for storage. In case you were wondering, this last phase is called “clean coal”…”

Dolphins may be cause of spike in porpoise deaths – “Marine biologists think they’ve figured out why a growing number of dead harbor porpoises have been found on California beaches in recent years: dolphin attacks…”

Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic – “The decline was rapid. I got my first pair of glasses aged 9, and by my mid-teens could no longer read the title on the cover of New Scientist at arm’s length. With my mum’s eyes just as bad, I always assumed that I’d inherited my short-sightedness from her and that I could do little to stop my vision from becoming a little blurrier each year…”

Spirit bears become ‘invisible’ – “On a few islands in western Canada, white ’spirit bears’ walk the woods. Now scientists have discovered why these striking animals, a race of black bear, survive…”

So Far, So Good for Blight-Resistant Chestnuts – “More than 50 years after nearly being wiped out in eastern U.S. forests by a deadly imported fungus, the American chestnut may be on the comeback trail…”

The artificial hand that feels – “The SmartHand project has produced a prototype motorized prosthetic hand that researchers say gives unprecedented sensory feedback…”

Watch Elizabeth Lambert, The Dirtiest Player In Women’s Soccer – “Lambert’s aggressive, dirty play was displayed on ESPN’s national stage during her team’s 1-0 loss Thursday night to Brigham Young University, and the results — unlike her — weren’t pretty…”

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