Your solution is for women to use pen-names when doing academic research? Really? If publishing under a (male) pseudonym is actually helpful, doesn't that prove the point that there is gender discrimination?

This story probably sparked the recent interest.

Unfortunately it (sports) does little to soften the scary fact that some day each of us will die. Or that a loved one will die. Or when the circumstances of our life are especially shitty. It's really not an effective substitute for religion in any of those scenarios.

It could mean it's very important to them to have that belief "box checked" even if they don't think there's any benefit to being an active participant. In any case, both the % of those polled who said religion is "very important" to them and the percentage of those polled who claim to have attended a church/synagogue service in the last 7 days have stayed roughly constant over the last ~20 years, so it seems premature to say that religious belief is falling off a cliff in the U.S. Religious self-identification is certainly in rapid decline, but it seems like the folks who formerly identified as religious but now identify as "none" are coming from the set of religious self-identifiers who weren't all that "into" religion in the first place.

To an extent. Sports fandom doesn't answer any existential questions, though. What is the purpose of my life? What happens when I die? What is the ultimate source of meaning? How do I know what is "right" and what is "wrong"? How can I know that my life has significance?

This would be relevant if the original poster delineates between "religious" and "religious nuts". I'm guessing he considers anyone for whom religion is "an important part of their daily life" to be a religious nut. Could be wrong.

So you agree with me. The statement that, "Religion is essentially 'I believe in a sky daddy because I'm ignorant of science'" is not accurate since there exist living counter-examples. That is, people who are not ignorant of science and yet who are nevertheless religious.

If you take the view that a predisposition to religious belief is an evolutionarily adaptive trait in the human species then it's highly unlikely it will "die out" any time soon. Become less prevalent? Sure. But if (some) people are hard-wired to believe then it's doubtful we'll see the "end of religion" any time soon.

Note: I'm intentionally not making a "religious" argument for the persistence of religion.

US is the only developed (or "more or less developed") country where religious nuts are still a majority.

Here is a list of countries by the importance of religion in the lives of their populace. Wiki is presenting Gallup poll results. 65% of those polled in the U.S. says religion is important in their daily lives. Here are numbers for some other "more or less developed" countries where a majority say religion is an important part of their lives:

Romania: 99.9%
Poland: 74.5%
Italy: 71.5%
Singapore: 70%
Austria: 55%
Ireland: 53.5%

Religion is essentially "I believe in a sky daddy because I'm ignorant of science."

How then to explain religious scientists? In all fairness, your summary of religion is pretty lacking. If you'd said, "I believe in a sky daddy because it meets some deep emotional need," then that's somewhat more defensible. Also, it adequately explains the existence of individuals who are the opposite of "ignorant" when it comes to science but yet who are nevertheless religious.

Here are Gallup's historical trends up to 2013. Some things to note:

1. The % of those who say religion is a "very important" part of their life has remained roughly constant.
2. The % of those who says religion is only a "fairly important" part of their life has showed more consistent decline.
3. The % of "nones" seems to be mostly cannibalizing from the "fairly important" group, who are essentially nominal believers. The % of people who are "devout" seems to be more-or-less holding its own.
4. The % of people who claim to have attended church or synagogue in the last 7 days has remained roughly constant.
5. The % of people who self-identify as "evangelical or born-again Christians" has remained roughly constant (except for an elevated plateau from 1998 to 2002).
6. The % who self-identify as "evangelical or born-again" is actually higher (40%) in 2013 than it was in 1992 (36%).

The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned.

Yes and no. I'd argue it depends on how you define "programming". If you're talking about "can code up basic solutions to relatively straightforward problems" then yes, with enough time, most people can probably learn to do that. Considerably fewer ever reach the point where the code they produce is (usually) elegant. Where they're capable of troubleshooting the most elusive bugs. Where they fairly quickly identify solutions that are orders of magnitude more efficient than the naive approach to a given problem.

I tend to think the folks who reach that level are able to do so by a combination of experience and some inherent traits that you can't just pick up in a programming class. An example from my current job:

My employer makes apps. Our app downloads some images over the network when it launches. It caches them so unless something changes there's not much going over the wire, but the initial download can take a while. Up to 30 seconds where the user is stuck watching a progress indicator on the splash screen. At least two different developers had worked on this app. Then the company hired a new guy (not me). One of the first things he did was refactor the image download code to use multiple threads and transfer the images concurrently instead of in serial. With 8 threads the speedup was approximately 5x. His key insight was that most of the images were very small, so much of the total time was latency and not lack of bandwidth. Especially since latency is so high on mobile networks.

Now the previous developers were not right out of school. They had years of experience. They could "program". But they didn't recognize an enhancement with significant implications for users when it was right there in front of their faces. It's possible that if they had been specifically instructed to optimize the image loading logic they would have come up with a similar solution. Maybe, maybe not. But why did the third guy immediately recognize the problem (and put in place a very effective solution) without being prompted? Was that a "skill" he learned in a programming class?

On multiple occasions this same guy has identified long-standing bugs in our app that I'm almost positive no other member of our team would have ever been able to figure out even with infinite time.

This isn't "evolution".

If the previous owners and/or their neighbors don't have service then assume you can't get it. Especially if you're livelihood depends on having broadband at home.

That is my experience as well. If you look at app development from the perspective of "I'm going to do this for an employer and get paid more than I was being paid to do {some other type of development}" and not "I'm going to create the next Angry Birds and get rich overnight" then it's a lot more satisfying.