SortStack #396 — 2027-07-10
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- An average human's reaction to a starting gun 252 ms
Athletics rules treat any sprint start faster than 100 milliseconds as a false start — it's considered humanly impossible to react that quickly.
- The men's 100 m freestyle world record swim 46.4 sec
Pan Zhanle's 46.40 at Paris 2024 stunned the field — he won by over a second, an eternity in a sprint event decided by fingernails.
- The Epsom Derby, Britain's most famous horse race 2.5 min
Workforce's 2010 record run covered the mile and a half at over 56 km/h — and the race has been run every year since 1780, even through both World Wars.
- A football (soccer) match, regulation time 90 min
The ball is typically in play for barely 55 of those minutes — which is why competitions now add increasingly enormous stoppage time.
- One full rotation of Earth on its axis 23.9 h
A true rotation takes 23 hours 56 minutes — the extra 4 minutes of our day come from Earth also moving along its orbit and needing to catch up to the Sun.
- The Cold War 43.9 years
Historians call it 'the long peace' — the superpowers never fought each other directly, but proxy wars touched nearly every continent.