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There is a train station in south London called Smitham and the odd thing is that Smitham doesn’t exist. Smitham is effectively North Coulsdon. The entire hamlet of Smitham seems to have been destroyed in the process of building the A23 and the train station. Imagine that planning meeting if you will:

Planner A: Hey there’s this small hamlet called Smitham that doesn’t have any access to transport.

Planner B: Yeah but it’s tiny they’ll just go to Coulsdon if they need to get anywhere.

Planner A: No, we must provide them with a busy transport link. That’s the only way they’ll ever progress.

Planner B: But there’s no space, nothing will fit.

Planner A: Well to develop a transport link sometimes you do have to knock down a few houses.

Planner B: But all of them? Surely that’s going a bit far.

Planner A: Do you hate progress.

Planner B: No.

Planner A: Well shut up and pass me the protractor.

So they destroyed the whole thing to build it, but then they left the station name the same. That’s what doesn’t quite make sense. It’s an odd solution. And now even that is under attack – from me.

I want to change the name of the station, purely for my own selfish reasons. Basically to make me laugh. I want the name of the station to become Andweep. Why? Well I’ll tell you why. The reason is that the station before it on the train line is called Reedham. And I want the announcer to have to say Reedham, Andweep. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I want it. And it turns out that it makes about as much sense as the current name anyway. So join me in the campaign to rename Smitham. Leave your votes in the comments.

My father has a theory about colds which may or may not be backed with any science but seems to be accurate in the field.

First you have to accept that the sniffles does not a cold make. Some people say that being a bit congested is a first sign of a cold but you can get the sniffles completely independently of a cold. First you have to allow this which I think is pretty reasonable.

So while holding that sniffles and a cold are unrelated we can now say that no two people in one family get a cold at the same time. People get sympathy sniffles but not concurrent colds. Each person in a family or an office will, in a rather British way, wait for the preceding person to finish up before falling ill themselves.

This is because, according to my father, there are a finite number of colds in the world. Each person is giving their cold to each other (as conventional wisdom holds) but in this model unlike conventional wisdom the cold departs the giver when it moves on to a new victim.

If you think back to past occasions when colds have been rife you will probably find this is true for you. One person caring for the other and then you swap.

Oh I’m sure you can think of some random occasion when this hasn’t been the case. But this is still possible if randomly you caught two different colds from two different people.

This does lead you to a rather interesting conclusion though. If the only way to get rid of a cold is to pass it on maybe lying in bed is asking for trouble. You only see your family members and then when they’re sick they only see you. Maybe going back into work works for you, maybe random strangers on the bus. Where ever you decide to do it you’ll need to expose yourself to others to get rid of the damn thing. So don’t stay tucked up in bed for too long.

Now “Alex”, you might be thinking, “if their are a finite number of colds where do they all go in the summer?” The answer is obvious. They migrate. They’re all in Australia at the moment as winter approaches “down under”.

Some things are difficult to search for on the internet. The best trick to use for finding things on the internet is to think in your mind of an exclusive sentence that is only relevant for the thing your searching for. This is harder than it seems but with a bit of practice you will find that you drastically improve the results of the thing that you’re searching for.

But some things are hard to look for. There are generally two reasons for this. One is that although your question is about something specific the specific thing shares a name with something common. Say for example you have a question about the html tag “table” well typing in table alone is no good, you have to type in html because other wise you get lots of information about the kind of tables that you sit at. But what if the modifier word is also a common word?

The second type of problem case is when you are researching something that nobody has ever researched before. If it’s something obscure then you are in luck. There are very very few truly original ideas that somebody hasn’t written about before on the internet. But if it’s about a common thing then it’s hard to write a question that lets you find the one article.

I was faced with this problem the other day. I had this strange feeling based on some information that I wasn’t sure about that it was a bad idea to take cans of soft drink (like Coke, Dr Peppers etc) in and out of the fridge once they had become cold. I couldn’t for the life of me think why this would be a problem, but I had this information in my mind. I came to the conclusion after some time that this was a rumour I had debunked a few years ago without checking any facts. The person who asked me probably left the conversation reassured after having asked Alex that it wasn’t a problem, and now years later it had come back to haunt me.

Luckily Yahoo Answers now has, erm, the answer because real people will answer your question for free on the internet. It’s all very useful. And I might even ask this question on there, although now my brain has clicked back in I’m pretty sure that it can’t be a problem. I have a nagging thought that condensation could be part of a counter answer. But I can’t rationally think how this would work.

Anyway, now that Yahoo Answers exists let me let you in on a little secret hack that you could have used in the old days if you needed the answer and couldn’t find it on a search engine. It would take a moment or two but in a bind it might be worth it. All you need to do is create an urban legend about your question. So in this example you would create an e-mail like this:

Dear friend,

Unless you forward this e-mail to your 5 best friends they might die and it will be all your fault.

Do you or your friends take soft drinks out of the fridge and then put them back afterwards. Do you do this when you’re trying to make room for pot roast leftovers or BBQ? Do you know it might kill you. Bacteria from the drinks arrive when they get cold, and then grow when you let the drinks get warm, and then when you put them back in the fridge the cold temperature causes the bacteria to thrive and mutate thus killing you.

Thanks,

A concerned Buddy,

And then you sit back and wait for Barbara Mikkelson (of snopes.com) to tell you the truth. It’s simple, effective, and probably a bit immoral. Hopefully Yahoo Answers will stop people from having to resort to such tactics from here on in.