SortStack #1355 — 2030-02-23
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A mantis shrimp throwing its famous punch 3 ms
The strike accelerates like a bullet and creates collapsing cavitation bubbles that briefly flash with light and heat — prey gets hit twice by one punch.
- 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 episode of The Simpsons, without adverts 22 min
The Simpsons is the longest-running scripted primetime series in US history — Bart has been ten years old for over three and a half decades.
- The film 'Gone with the Wind', with overture and intermission 4 h
Still the longest film ever to win Best Picture — and adjusted for inflation, it remains the highest-grossing film of all time.
- The Holy Roman Empire, from Otto the Great to its dissolution 844 years
Voltaire quipped it was 'neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire' — yet it lasted 844 years before Napoleon finished it off in 1806.
- The age of the oldest known figurative cave painting (Sulawesi) 51.1K years
The Indonesian rock art depicts wild pigs and human-like figures — painted tens of thousands of years before Lascaux's famous bulls.