SortStack #2419 — 2033-01-22
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A camera speedlight flash firing at full power 1 ms
At low power settings, flash bursts get even shorter — down to around 1/30,000 of a second, fast enough to freeze a bursting balloon mid-pop.
- 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.
- One swing of a grandfather clock's pendulum 1 sec
A pendulum about one metre long swings in almost exactly one second — a coincidence so neat it was once proposed as the definition of the metre.
- A standard television commercial 30 sec
A single Super Bowl slot of this length has sold for over US$7 million — more than US$230,000 per second of airtime.
- The construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza 20 years
Herodotus and modern estimates agree on roughly two decades — meaning workers placed a multi-tonne block about every five minutes of daylight.
- 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.