My milieu mostly exposes me to people who have a good grasp of basic science, even the ones with arts and letters degrees. For that matter, the ones with technical degrees are often well-versed in literature and history. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim membership in a Renaissance coterie, yet we manage some fairly wide-ranging conversations, and we can learn from each other.

During the last three years I’ve been working with the general public, and it occurs to me that some people aren’t like this. Last week a regular customer came into the store looking for “fermented zinc,” a product he insisted he had purchased from us before. I’m thinking, Does fermentation work on minerals? After scouring the shelves, I pointed out that we had fermented chlorella, and he said, Oh yes, that’s what I wanted, thanks! But I also need zinc, what makes it bioavailable? I showed him the chelated zinc. He’s a maven of his own health and a nice person I enjoy discussing things with, and this slight obfuscation of two terms with similar goals doesn’t make him a science zero, yet it felt odd to me. Fermentation seems biological.

A contestant on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me last weekend, playing the game in which one chooses the true story among three, chose one about an octopus that pitched baseballs at major league speeds, throwing eight strikes in a row, one from each arm. An octopus is completely soft-bodied, excepting only the beak, which is why it is such a talented escape artist. We all know it can open bottles and such, but flinging a 5-ounce item 90 feet at 80 miles per hour? Not to mention the implication that this was done on-demand and sequentially by arm. Admittedly, all the stories are outrageous; the true one was about a minor league baseball GM getting a prostate exam during the seventh inning stretch, while leading the singing over the loudspeaker. Anything for charity? Perhaps I should worry more about the appropriateness deficit than the science deficit.

One of my current coworkers is a flat-earther, which is fascinating, since I had not previously met one. He is younger than me, too–most people are, but we’re talking decades; I always pictured such believers as old fogies. He cites a lot of evidence and explanations that may sound creditable if you have roughly zero grounding in elementary school science. This person is intelligent by many measures, so I have to postulate a cause: Home-schooled by conspiracy theorists? I don’t acquiesce, nor do I argue. I simply tell him I’m very comfortable living on a roundish planet in a solar system that’s in one of billions of galaxies that are part of an expanding space-time continuum, so I have no need to follow any of the Internet sites he recommends, which show satellites dangling from hot air balloons, among other wonders.

I know science changes when humans learn new things, or re-learn things we have forgotten, but there is some axiomatic base that is clearly shared by my group, a knowledge substrate on which I rely, without which I feel life would be confusing and disturbing, and which I am grateful to have acquired.