Theme parks, accurate tapes, and cooling towers!

• Is four hours too long for a deep-dive retrospective on Disney's now-shuttered Star Wars hotel? Jenny Nicholson's video is part review, part analysis, and part excoriation of the recent penny-pinching trends of the Disney parks. And oddly, I don't think this could be much shorter: this feels like an appropriate level of detail, at least if theme parks are your sort of jam.
   
• Surely you've already seen the new Bobby Fingers video (very strong language, adult themes, irresponsible filming on a roller coaster) but just in case: it's another project where the title and thumbnail under-promise while the content wildly over-delivers. What looks like a video about making a diorama of a notorious bit of pop-culture history becomes a lot, lot more.
   
• Machine Thinking finds the most accurate tape measure: or rather, the most accurate tape measure measure, with a visit to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. I've worked with NIST before, and it's good to see behind the scenes at another one of their testing labs.
   
• It's rare to see anywhere near this much attention to detail in a video, both in terms of the crafting and the editing: Luca Iaconi-Stewart builds a miniature GE90-115B engine out of manila folders. Seventy hours of footage in a timelapse, not even showing the design process — with details synchronised to the music! (Thanks to Tian for sending this over.)
   
• It's been a while since I've linked to one of Destin's videos over at Smarter Every Day: ostensibly this is about photographing something unknown during the eclipse (excellent title optimisation there), but really it's a story about how, in Destin's words, "interested people are interesting". It's a quest to recreate an old shot, and also to solve a minor astronomical mystery.
   

• Astronomers have discovered a giant planet, 1,200 light years away, with the rough density of candyfloss / cotton candy. (Presumably that's an average across a density gradient, but it's a brilliant bit of science communication to pick that comparison.)
   
• A wonderfully pedantic article about non-standard British road numbering. That's not sarcasm, it's a great article and it's also extremely pedantic.
   
• The most common PINs used for bank cards and passcodes. It took me a few seconds to work out why "7410" was so popular.

And finally: the Temelin power plant, in Czechia, occasionally projects giant, blinking eyes onto their cooling towers.

All the best,

— Tom