Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.
The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3
https://www.nist.gov/atomic-clocks/how-atomic-clocks-work/cl...