Objects on the table may be shorter than they appear...

The other day I mentioned that the Lego Space Needle fell over.  It's been standing for years, so that's a bit odd.  As I mentioned in that post, a major contributing factor seems to be that the bricks I was using weren't the expected size.

Here's a video where I demonstrate the problem.  (You might have to go full-screen to see the seams between bricks)

I didn't measure exactly, but if you build a big long tower of the 3-tall Lego bricks, and another of the 1-tall Lego bricks that are nominally the same size, then we discover that the 3-tall Lego bricks are a bit shorter than one would expect.

In this example, 35 of the 3-tall bricks (white) should be about the same height as 105 of the 1-tall bricks (green).  In practice, the 3-tall bricks were a tiny bit too short.  Yes, they are all very firmly attached to each other.

At Comicon, I asked Dan Parker, LCP, if he'd noticed anything like that before.  Apparently there are some bricks where the tolerances add up and things don't align as one would expect.

Makes me wonder what I would've done if I'd originally build the model with the other bricks.  Would I have made shorter legs or made the center tower taller?