SortStack #501 — 2027-10-23

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. A lightning flash from start to finish 198 ms

   What looks like one bolt is usually several return strokes in a row, heating the air to around 30,000°C — five times hotter than the Sun's surface.

2. Cooking a perfect soft-boiled egg 4.5 min

   At high altitude it takes noticeably longer — water boils below 100°C up a mountain, which is why mountaineers complain about their eggs.

3. Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 5.9 min

   Radio executives told Freddie Mercury it was far too long to ever get airplay. It topped the UK charts twice, 16 years apart.

4. The Apollo 13 mission, launch to splashdown 6 days

   After the oxygen tank exploded, the crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat and slingshotted around the Moon — NASA's 'successful failure'.

5. New Horizons' journey from Earth to Pluto 9.5 years

   It left Earth as the fastest spacecraft ever launched — and Pluto was demoted from planet status just seven months into the trip.

6. The time humans have lived in Australia 65K years

   Aboriginal Australians' roughly 65,000 years make theirs the oldest continuous culture on Earth — some oral histories describe coastlines drowned by rising seas 10,000 years ago.

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