Leap seconds are a thing [And there’s a 20 mile cable under London] | RISE Macclesfield | Group Personal Training gym weight loss programmes

I mentioned leap seconds yesterday.

Did you know they were a thing?

I didn’t until the other week.

Every now and again, the clocks leap forward a second.

To make up for the inconsistencies of the speed of rotation of the earth.

Especially compared to modern clocks which can be so accurate that they’d only have lost a handful of seconds, at most, in the 4.5 billion years the earth has been around.

We don’t even notice these leap seconds of course.

There’s only been 25 in the last 43 years.

Some people notice them though.

Traders do.

Big time.

Since the stock markets went digital, there have been occasions where people have lost millions in that second when the process wasn’t properly managed.

So they had a 20 mile long fibre optic cable installed under the streets of London that all Financial Institutions run their timings off.

There’s an 827 mile long cable between Chicago and New York that was put in at a cost of $180 million in order to reduce the time it took to send a message between the two cities from 17 milliseconds to 13.

Allowing traders to ‘make’ £12 billion a year extra from High Frequency Trading.

Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is mind blowing.

Such a tiny amount of time making such a difference.

But it is often the case that the smaller things make a bigger difference than we might imagine.

There are 31,536,000,000 millisecond in a year.

You could argue that each of those 4 millisecond savings only made £1.52 each (I know it doesn’t quite work that way, but work with me here).

They all add up.

Each little food choice adds up to more of a difference over time than we might imagine.

Swapping a daily can of coke to a diet coke would equate to over a stone lost per year.

Dropping a mid morning slice of cake would be two stone.

28 units a week of a spirit rather than of beer would be a stone.

If we have 56 units, it would be two stone.

Some swap in what we eat at each meal, that we like just as much, and is just as convenient and costs the same…………

But is 100 calories less………..

Would be over two stone lost in a year.

All of the above little adjustments together would be 7 stone.

And would life be all that much different and less enjoyable there?

Big changes are fine if we can maintain them.

But, like cables that shave off milliseconds and manage leap seconds, can make millions (or billions) of pounds…………

Little adjustments to our food and drink can bring big changes to our results!

Much love,

Jon ‘Lords a leaping’ Hall

P.S. The biggest return on effort you’ll ever make is to reply to this with INFO to find out more about what we do!

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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!