I clocked you going 55.01 mph in a 55.00 mph zone.

Everyone (and by everyone I mean previous world record holders) got real mad going into the Beijing Olympics because Michael Phelps and his friends had super-powered swimsuits that made them break basically every swimming record ever. People that were freakishly fast became a tiny, tiny, tiny bit faster and nudged out world records by hundredths of seconds.
The swimming powers-that-be are acting fast to block these super suits from being used again.

Here's my problem: a hundredth of a second is a ridiculous, arbitrary number that has no place in sports, or really anywhere except particle physics.
Do you know how fast a hundredth of a second is? It's basically one tenth of the amount of time you could ever possibly hope to observe. The fastest humans in the world have reaction times around 0.13 seconds, which is 13 hundredths. So when Michael Phelps, or some other intrepid athlete from any number of sports (track and field is full of such records) lands a time that beats an old record by less than a tenth of a second, he has done so by so small a margin no human in existence could actually notice.
Often you hear the announcers discussing Phelps extension to reach the wall, and how his hands touch the wall first. Announcers, apparently, are either aliens or robots, because they have seen what no human could ever observe. Even slowing down the footage by a factor of ten, i.e. the slow motion replay, Phelps could still be so close in front of his competition that no human could perceive the difference.

Here's another example. I noticed last week during a college basketball game that a player in-bounded the ball and another player immediately called timeout. The clock showed 1.3 seconds. The referees immediately huddled over monitors to discuss and analyze how much time remained on the clock. They decided the clock should be moved to 1.4 seconds. Once again, the change was smaller than a human being could perceive, but thanks to modern technology, it was no problem to add pointless quanta of time (on the ensuing play the team lost) back onto the clock.

In overtime of the Villanova-Boston College game of the 2006 NCAA men's basketball tournament, 3.5 seconds showed as remaining. A Villanova player caught the inbounds, took a step and scored a basket. Then the clock showed 2.3 seconds. It's pretty hard to believe you can catch the ball, take a step and score a basket in 1.2 seconds -- remember, this must include time for the ball to go through the hoop. Anyway, officials huddled, looked at replays and confidently reset the game clock to 3 seconds. Not only were the officials declaring themselves able to sense eight-tenths of a second -- the time it takes to snap your fingers -- they were saying the Villanova player caught a pass, took a step and scored a basket in only half a second!

Anyway, the real problem I have with this fascination with tenths and hundredths of seconds is when the NFL combine comes around this spring. Players will run the 40 yard dash as fast as they can, and the NFL draft committees (and the talkingheads doing 24/7 coverage on NFL Network) will argue whether draft picks should be disappointed with a 4.38 time when they usually post a 4.36. Or they'll marvel over a larger tight end or linebacker who runs a surprising 4.45 time.
All of these numbers are completely pointless! No human being can perceive the difference between 4.35 and 4.50! Nevertheless, talkingheads will argue that a draft pick "looked a little slower than normal" with his time that was imperceptably slower than his regular time.

For example, there was a lot of hype surrounding Reggie Bush before he went to the draft. The New Orleans Times-Picayune said Bush ran a 4.37 at the combine, while the New York Daily News said the time was 4.33. Len Pasquarelli of ESPN.com said Bush was hand-timed at 4.41 and electronically timed at 4.37. Gil Brandt of NFL.com said that at USC's Pro Day, Bush had an electronically timed 4.33, and that electronic timing "adds about .08 of a second to the actual time. For instance, if someone ran the 40 in 4.50 seconds electronically timed, it really means he ran it in about 4.42 seconds." In "about" 4.42 seconds? Countered Profootballtalk.com: "Despite a report from Gil Brandt of NFL.com that Heisman winner Reggie Bush put up a 4.33 in Sunday's Pro Day workout, a league source tells us Bush was hand timed at 4.4." The Los Angeles Daily News declared, "NFL teams who hand-timed the races gave Bush times ranging from 4.41 to 4.44." Sports Illustrated: "Reggie Bush was a tad disappointed in running his 40 in 4.33 seconds." What, he expected a 4.32?

Stop, please stop, using hundredths of seconds.