SortStack #2958 — 2034-07-15

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. 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.

2. The men's 100 m freestyle world record swim 46.4 sec

   Pan Zhanle's 46.40 at Paris 2024 stunned the field — he won by over a second, an eternity in a sprint event decided by fingernails.

3. An evening at Wagner's opera 'Götterdämmerung', intervals included 5.5 h

   It's only the finale: the full Ring cycle spans four operas over about 15 hours of music, and devotees attend all four nights in a row.

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. A tiger's pregnancy 105 days

   Cubs are born blind and helpless at around a kilogram — yet within two years they're apex predators ten times their mother's litter weight.

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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