SortStack #907 — 2028-12-02

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. One heartbeat of a hummingbird in flight 48 ms

   Hummingbird hearts can hit 1,260 beats per minute in flight, then crash to about 50 at night when the bird enters a hibernation-like torpor.

2. A proper hand wash, by WHO guidelines 19.8 sec

   The recommended scrub lasts about as long as singing 'Happy Birthday' twice — most people manage barely a third of it.

3. The Titanic's sinking, from iceberg to going under 2.7 h

   The ship's band famously kept playing on deck for most of it — and the iceberg itself had likely calved from a Greenland glacier years earlier.

4. A flight from London to New York 8.2 h

   Flying west against the jet stream adds about an hour versus the return leg — eastbound flights have surfed the tailwind to under 5 hours.

5. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe 25 days

   The world's largest arts festival stages over 3,000 shows — by ticket sales it trails only the Olympics and the football World Cup.

6. 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.

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