Tequila Mocking (Bird)

I’m currently writing an article about the chemical analysis of tequila for my chemistry news webzine Reactive Reports. I did the usual scan of Wikipedia to get some basic info on this agave-based spirit and found a nice picture taken on a Canon Digital Rebel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tequila-sunny-window.jpg

Apparently, the photographer shot this image at a shutter speed of 1/60 second. All well and good, but then in their wisdom the wiki editors have decreed that this value (which is standard format throughout the photography world, should be reproduced in decimal too. So, we have the ridiculous value of 0.0166666666667 given for the shutter speed too. Why did they cut it off at so few significant figures? Probably that’s as much as their calculator displayed when they divided 1 by 60!

More to the point, who would want to know this value in decimal anyway, there’s no dial on any camera, anywhere in the world that doesn’t just say 1/60 for the shutter speed this sig fig rich value represents. Moreover, there’s no way shutter speed could be measured to that degree of accuracy on any standard camera you could buy!