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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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And Hogwarts has ventilation ducts large enough to fit a basilisk!
Snakes can get through spaces much smaller than it looks like they should be able to. It doesn't seem ruled out that a magic snake can do that to a greater extent. So this implies big ductwork but not enormous ductwork.
In fairness, circulating air in a castle whose geometry is best represented by an arbitrarily connected graph (not necessarily acyclic), is a non-trivial engineering challenge. After a few student asphyxiated, they may just have gone a little overboard.
I now declare this to be MoR!canon. (That large magical dwellings in general have large highly-connected, possibly magical air-ducts, by tradition, to prevent the occasional cases where somebody asphyxiated; and that Salazar used this as his excuse for why Hogwarts's ventilation ducts had to be so large.)
Aguamenti creates water out of nothing, which you can drink. The Bubble-Head Charm could, in theory, work some way other than creating thin air out of thin air, but personally I doubt it does.
Ha!
I initially wrote 'create breathable air out of thin air' and then couldn't resist.
I never, in Canon, got quite such an impression of Eerie Alien Geometries from the castle as I do in MoR. Thankfully Event Horizon hadn't come out in 1991, or I'd wager a lot of Muggleborns would be very uncomfortable in the upper floors.
The ventilation ducts in large buildings are roughly 1m^2 in cross-sectional area, branching out to ducts that are roughly.1m^2 in cross-sectional area.
A python is 6 meters long and has a cross-sectional area of .015m^2. Assuming the aspect ratio of the snake body stays roughly constant, a basilisk is 15 meters long, and would have a cross-sectional area of .094m^2. Barely enough to through ventilation ducts.
I think basiliks are a little thicker than pythons (from the second movie) and much longer than 15 m (from awesomeness).