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Don't you just hate it when you're looking for an address and the house numbers don't seem to go in sequence? CW does. Or, rather, our company chauffeur does. Drives him crazy.

THE QUESTION: “How do residences and buildings acquire street addresses?” asked Kate Soles of Victoria. “I live at 1067 but my neighbour lives at 1071. What happened to 1069?”

THE ANSWER: Michael Hall worked for 37 years for the city of Burlington, Ont., where street numbers are assigned when building permits are issued (or shortly before that) using a grid system established in the 1950s.

On this grid, he says, “numbers increase by two for each 25 feet of street frontage.” So, on a street of houses with 25-foot frontages, if your house is 100, your neighbour will be 102, the next house will be 104, and so on.

However, if a residence is in a subdivision where the lots are 50 feet wide, “there will usually be a difference of four between its address and the addresses of the adjoining residences.” So, in this scenario, if your house is 100, your neighbour will be 104 and the next house will be 108.

Mr. Hall says the system assigns odd numbers to addresses on the north sides of east-west streets and the east sides of north-south streets. “Even numbers are assigned to addresses on the opposite sides.”

FURTHER NOTICE

Last week, we looked at the question of why, if hot air rises, it gets colder the higher up a mountain you go. Some CW readers said our explanation was close but it didn't exactly deserve a cigar as we confused heat content with temperature (a difference we don't have space to go into right now).

So here's James R. Drummond of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Halifax to set the record straight.

He says that when air expands, it cools down. It's the reverse of the bicycle pump that gets hot when you compress the air to get it into the tire.

“The sun heats the ground, the ground heats the air and the air rises.” As it rises, it expands due to lower atmospheric pressure and cools down. It then falls to the ground to be heated up again, and so on.

He says the situation in the Canadian Arctic, where the sun doesn't heat the ground for long periods during the winter, can be quite different.

“Then, the ground cools quickly due to ‘radiative cooling to space' and it actually gets colder the closer you get to the ground.” He says that at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory at Eureka, Nunavut, on Nov. 3, the temperature at sea level was -33.7 Celsius, but 600 metres higher, it was a balmy -23.1.

HELP WANTED

• Dot Quiggin of Toronto asks: Why does the Queen always carry a purse while officiating at public ceremonies? What's in it?
• Why do dogs hang out the window of travelling vehicles? Carol Siblock of Birken, B.C., wants to know.
• Alex Coney, 11, of Thornhill, Ont., wonders how the dividing line between Europe and Asia was determined.

Send answers and questions to wisdom@globeandmail.com. Please include your name, location and a daytime phone number.