What Caught My Eye Today: Iran, Defense Spending, Jupiter, Passwords

Iran - Iranian women are no longer allowed to pursue certain majors--including engineering, computer science and accounting--at the country's top universities. Iran has long been a leader in women's education in the Middle East, and women now make up more than 60% of undergraduates. No kidding? Good for them. I would not have guessed that. Of course this begs the question, why stop them from getting an education now? The government gave no reason for the new restrictions, although it has expressed alarm at the declining birth and marriage rates leading some to speculate that the regime is trying to restrict women's access to education and to return them to the home to weaken the feminist movement. You have to appreciate the irony. Here you have a society that has evolved to the point where a significant majority of undergraduate college students are female, resorting to a Stone Age mentality to curb a decreasing birthrate. Here's radical idea, make it easier for women to bear and raise children without having to give up their day jobs.

Defense Spending - Last year, the U.S. Army made an unusual request to Congress: Stop sending us tanks. That doesn't sound right. The plea was issued after legislators ignored the Army's objections and approved a defense appropriations bill that included $255 million for 42 new M1 Abrams tanks. This, on the other hand, is exactly what I would expect from Congress. With 2,300 M1s already deployed around the world, and 3,000 more sitting idle at a base in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, the military said it simply didn't need any more tanks. But Ohio politicians pushed for the extra M1s, so as to keep open an 800-worker tank plant in the state. And we wonder why the national debt keeps spiraling out of control. There has be be a cheaper way to save 800 jobs. For those of you interested in the math, that works out to $318,750 per job.

Jupiter - Let's give a well deserved shout out to that lovable beast of a planet, Jupiter. Who would have thought that our lives, most likely, have depended on that gaseous behemoth for so long. The massive planet Jupiter serves as a cosmic sentinel, sucking in comets and asteroids that might otherwise make catastrophic direct strikes on Earth. Four asteroid strikes have been observed in just the past three years. The strikes suggest that Jupiter acts as "a big gravitational vacuum cleaner" for asteroids and comets that would otherwise continue on a collision course with the Earth. Experts say Jupiter may sustain an asteroid impact as often as once a week. Earth, by comparison, can expect a mass-extinction-causing asteroid to strike just once every 100 million years. The last such strike, which caused the demise of the dinosaurs as the planet's dominant species, came 65 million years ago. Guess I better get cracking on my bucket list, what with only 35 million years or so left before the possible extinction of human kind.

Passwords - The three most popular four-digit PINs are 1234, 1111, and 0000, which account for nearly 20% of all four-digit pass codes, according to an analysis of millions of passwords. The least popular PIN is 8068. Where to begin. Perhaps the obvious first...1234. Really? I'm not saying that I condone password hacking in any way, shape or form, but seriously, if 20% of the population is going to make it that easy... Next, how about some love for 8068? Or for that matter 8093, 9629,6835 and 7637, which round out the bottom five. Curiously, no reason was given for why these are the pariah of PIN numbers. I thought I was all set for the day that when you could have an unlimited PIN number. I've been working on memorizing 31415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 for months. Turns out that was a waste of time. It seems derivatives of pi have littered the top ten list of 5 and 10 digit PIN numbers for quite some time. Doh!