[Scrapper1]

Originally Posted by Dan_ref

you're concerned with making cute debating style points instead of hearing my message.

I admit, I'm trying to stay light-hearted in the face of being called an ***. But I'm not being cute. I honestly don't care what the convention is. Exactly 14 seconds equals exactly 14.0 seconds. That's the bottom line. To deny that is to make mathematics non-sensical. To say that you don't care about extra decimal places is a far cry from saying that extra decimal places don't change the value of a given number. Let's say we time a runner in a sprint and our stopwatch measures to hundredths of a second. We time him at 9.85 seconds. I understand that we don't care about whatever extra thousandths he took to cross the line. But that doesn't mean that 9.85 actually equals the 9.851 that would've been measured on a slightly more accurate stopwatch.

For this very reason we have absolutely no standing to come to any conclusion on the measurement of time between 15 and 14.

Maybe so. But we can come to the conclusion that there are 14 seconds or more remaining.

When you say 14 you are saying it could be 14.0, 14.1, 14.2....or maybe even 13.9.

Jeez, I don't think I'm saying that at all!! When I say "there's 14 on the clock", I'm saying that I see "14" displayed. I'm not making any comment on 14.1 or 14.2 or whatever.

when Micky D says they sold billions and billions, do you think they have the exact number sold down to a single burger?

No. But if they did have it down to a single burger -- say, 324,571,609,212 -- I bet that's the same as 324,571,609,212.0 burgers.