Discussion Main / BiggerOnTheInside

I feel like the Doctor Who folder should be split off into a separate page due to its sheer length.

Should we split the page to distinguish between deliberate examples using Applied Phlebotinum and accidental examples where the exterior of a vehicle or building doesn't match the interior?

The Anglo/American and the Scandinavian/Dutch approaches to the design of standard family homes contrast in an interesting way. The former copies and scales down the ideas of stately mansions; even when one is reasonably well off and has anywhere between 100 and 500 square metres of living space, one remains acutely aware of inhabiting the shrunken down version of something grander. The Nordics by contrast are masters of innovative design that makes a modest home on a tiny footprint feel spacious. Here are some of the tricks:

1) Use of angles other than 90 degrees. This creates an illusion of more room _on the other side_ of a wall than is there.

2) Variation of ceiling height, with different footprints for different floors. This makes the floor on the next level appear as a design feature of the ceiling of the current floor, lessening the sense of its proximity.

3) Vary the main direction of the walk-through flow between floors. Whenever an inhabitant cannot readily picture what is above what, this adds to an overall labyrinthine impression that enlarges the space. (This point pertains to the intuitive feel - obviously when one has to, say, install a pipe or lay an electric cable one can figure out where everything is relative to everything else.)

4) Use of floor space voids - daring in a property that is already small, but the void can be shared between adjacent areas, creating a sense of "extension" in all these areas. That is, one and the same empty corner provides breathing room to several other areas.

5) If the home looks out on a park, a forest, open water etc.: install large windows! In a variation on trick 4, let as many of your modest properties share in the sense of open space by an interleaved "fractal" or "cauliflower" design of the street plan.

I know it would be an optical illusion but... I've heard many a story where the rich owner of an ancient castle/mansion orders his staff to hang towels out every window. Despite the staff supposedly knowing where the heck each room is, it's can be clearly seen that one or more windows don't have towels. Of course the solution to this is to have the known towels withdrawn slowly one by one and when the ones next to the mystery room is touched, order the servant to freeze. Then find him or her and go a'bustin' through the wall.

If you read the entry about "House of Leaves", and then go down to the real-life entry about General Relativity, they have a similar description: both the earth and the House are slightly bigger when measured from the inside. Do you think the author knew about this phenomenon, or is it just a freaky coincidence?

There's another hilarious example of this in the movie Shark Attack 3 : Megalodon where the mini sub that the star and his older sidekick are taking out to confront the giant shark is barely big enough from the outside to hold both people but from the inside looks as big as the Batcave from the 60's TV show and seems like it could easily fit 9 or 10 people.

I'd like to point out that "it's smaller on the outside!" literally is said in Doctor Whooves and Assistant (dunno which episode). Not really interesting other than that the claim in the begin-text is now incorrect.

Minecraft should really be listed under video games. Considering that the blocks are a cubic meter, the maximum number of blocks in an inventory slot are 64, and there are 36 block-capable inventory slots, the player can carry in his or her pockets a maximum of 2,284 cubic meters of material.

The densest material in the game, I believe, is gold, with a density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter. The mass per cubic meter, then, would be 19,300 kilograms, with a mass per stack of 1,235,200 kilograms, and a maximum mass of 44,467,200 kilograms in inventory.

For reference, the player is about 1.66 meters tall.