SortStack #3623 — 2036-05-10

By duration · Order from shortest to longest.

1. A single wingbeat of a hovering hummingbird 12.6 ms

   Up to 80 wingbeats per second lets hummingbirds hover, fly backwards, and even fly upside down — no other bird can do all three.

2. A single blink of the human eye 348 ms

   We blink around 15-20 times a minute, and the brain edits out the darkness — you're effectively blind for about 10% of your waking hours.

3. Sunlight travelling from the Sun's surface to Earth 8.3 min

   If the Sun vanished right now, we'd keep seeing it — and orbiting it — for another 8 minutes and 20 seconds before noticing anything.

4. 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.

5. The Cold War 43.9 years

   Historians call it 'the long peace' — the superpowers never fought each other directly, but proxy wars touched nearly every continent.

6. How long the Parthenon has been standing 2.5K years

   It survived largely intact for over 2,000 years — until 1687, when a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder the Ottomans had stored inside.

← All puzzles · Play today’s SortStack