New England Skeptical Society

The New England Skeptical Society (NESS) is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting science and reason. It was founded in 1996 (originally as the Connecticut Skeptical Society).

The NESS produces a podcast titled The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (SGU). The podcast is released on a more-or-less weekly basis; first broadcast on 04 May 2005, as of 07 October 2009 the podcast is ranked 9th among science and medicine podcasts on iTunes and has an average 5-star rating based upon 1357 ratings.

Podcast

 * Steven Novella, MD: You can't reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.
 * Podcast #38


 * The amount of years that she will live longer than us because of her diet is directly proportional to the horror of her life.
 * Podcast #39 &mdash; A comment about Rebecca Watson's vegetarian life style


 * Rebecca Watson :What's unique about this is that he's combining 2 balls of crap together to make one huge ball of crap.
 * Podcast #41


 * Jay Novella: What logical fallacy is "Oh yeah?!"
 * Podcast #43


 * Jay Novella: If aromatherapy really worked then my own farts would kill me.
 * Podcast #53


 * Perry DeAngelis: All ornithologists are misanthropes.
 * Podcast #53


 * Perry DeAngelis:Any monkey worth his salt would give any bird a beak-flip.
 * Podcast #53


 * Perry DeAngelis: And remember, Chi spelled backward is crap.
 * Podcast #56


 * Perry DeAngelis: Thank god my skepticism has saved me from miracles.
 * Podcast #57


 * Evan Bernstein: What did we learn here? Sometimes you go with your gut. Except when you don't.
 * Podcast #59


 * Rebecca Watson:I won't mate with any of the true believers.
 * Podcast #65


 * Robert Novella: We might be outcasts but we're not misinformed.
 * Podcast #67


 * Steven Novella, MD: This is pure pseudoscience. This is slick marketing. And you can tell your mommy and daddy that I said so.
 * Podcast #71


 * Perry DeAngelis: Astrology is as vacuous as the space it worships.
 * Podcast #83

If you make a claim, however, that does not make any predictions that can be either confirmed or falsified, then science can say nothing about it. That is agnosticism. That is the difference. It can't say whether or not the "unfalsifiable hypothesis" is true, it cannot make any statements about probability, it cannot say anything &mdash; except that it makes no testable predictions. That's it. Anything else is philosophy, ideology, or wishful thinking.
 * Steven Novella, MD: Science does not make statements about proof or disproof. Rather, science is a constantly evolving model or reality that builds upon statements such as &mdash; this model of reality makes these predictions, that have either been confirmed or refuted, etc. We say things are probable or likely to be true in science if the predictions that flow from them have been confirmed. We say things are likely to be untrue if they make predictions that turned out to be false. We can further say that certain things are impossible if they create a logical contradiction.