SortStack #564 — 2027-12-25
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A car airbag inflating after a crash 30 ms
The bag must fully inflate before your head arrives — roughly ten times faster than the blink of an eye, driven by a controlled chemical explosion.
- 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.
- An amber traffic light before it turns red 4 sec
Amber phases are tuned to road speed — typically 3 seconds in town and up to 6 on fast roads, calculated from braking distance physics.
- One full rotation of the London Eye 30 min
It moves so slowly — about 0.9 km/h — that it usually doesn't stop to let passengers on; you simply step into the moving capsule.
- Mike the Headless Chicken's life after losing his head 1.5 years
The 1945 axe missed Mike's brain stem; fed by eyedropper, he toured sideshows and his Colorado hometown still throws him an annual festival.
- 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.