“What we do know is that it will hold nothing too large to fit inside a cube measuring 14:14 inches recurring on a side, that it will cease working if, we now know, a non-organic object is not replaced in it in 14:14 hours recurring, and that none of its contents are pink, although we do not know why this should be.”
I don’t undersand the second usage.
I take it to mean 14.141414141414… i.e. 14 and 14/99ths. Just a bit of additional mathematical verbiage thrown in to jazz up the sentence, more so since we normally wouldn’t use it in time measurements like hours and minutes.
Ah, cool! I had always wondered that, too. Thanks for asking, and answering 
Yes, “recurring” is apparently synomous with “repeating” when describing numbers, so 14.14 recurring means just what 14.14 repeating would mean 14.1414141414…
If we assume that 14 hours 14 minutes recurring means 14 hours, 14 minutes, 14 seconds, 14/60 seconds and so on, then it’s 840/59 hours…
It’s usually used with divisions of 3 or 6 - 3.3333333333333… is much easier to type as 3.3 recurring. So I assume this was just making the formula sound more like technobabble.
I understood the meaning immediately.
Possibly using Recurring in this sense may be a quirk of British language?
We were taught in school to use “recurring” here in the antipodean Commonwealth. What do Americans use instead?
“repeating” (see Repeating decimal - Wikipedia)