SortStack #186 — 2026-12-12
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- Half-time in a football (soccer) match 15 min
The break exists partly thanks to early English schools with different rules — teams switched codes at the interval when playing each other.
- Yuri Gagarin's entire Vostok 1 spaceflight 108 min
The first human spaceflight was a single orbit — and Gagarin ejected and parachuted down separately from his capsule, landing in a potato field.
- A horse's pregnancy 340 days
Foals can stand within an hour of birth and gallop within a day — a survival feature for a prey animal born on open grassland.
- The filming of Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood' 11.4 years
The same cast reunited for a few days each year so the actors aged in real time — the lead grew from age six to eighteen on screen.
- The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza 20 years
Herodotus and modern estimates agree on roughly two decades — meaning workers placed a multi-tonne block about every five minutes of daylight.
- The time since the last woolly mammoths died out 4K years
A dwarf population survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BC — meaning mammoths were alive while the Giza pyramids were already centuries old.