A discussion paper, following up on “The floating point: Tales of the unexpected“, co-authored by David Faux (Physics, Surrey) and Janet Godolphin, and reported on the blog here, has been published in the American Journal of Physics (link here). The papers are attracting media attention, with particular attention to the implications for stopwatch errors, with an article in the NewScientist here and an article here in EurekaAlert. The image below shows the % occurrence of the final two displayed digits of manual race times obtained from two swimming competitions. The expected mean 1% occurrence and standard deviation of each digit pair are indicated by the horizontal red solid and red dashed lines, respectively. The observed distribution is statistically impossible if each hundredth is equally likely.