SortStack #1320 — 2030-01-19

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. Usain Bolt's 100 m world record run 9.6 sec

   Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin 2009, hitting a top speed of 44.7 km/h — faster than the speed limit on many city streets.

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. A dentist-approved tooth brushing session 2 min

   Studies show most people actually brush for about 45 seconds while believing they've done the full recommended time.

4. 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.

5. How long the Hagia Sophia has been standing 1.5K years

   Built in just five years under Justinian, it has since served as cathedral, mosque, museum, and mosque again across nearly 1,500 years.

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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