[mikepurvis]

I think he's speaking historically. Obviously now a second is a fundamental SI unit defined in terms of physics experiments, but the origin of it was as the amount of time that was 1/3600th of an hour of which there are 24 in the day.

[shadowgovt]

Similar to how almost-pi-squared meters-per-second shows up in the constant for gravitational acceleration near Earth's surface because the meter was originally "the length of pendulum that ticks once a second" and there's a pi in the pendulum motion equation.

(... it's not exactly pi-squared because the French yanked it around a bit before settling into the modern number based on light in a vacuum and cesium atoms).