Ummm, on a farm you milk the cows and gather eggs and move the herd BEFORE breakfast. Then you tend to the crops for several hours before lunch, if you have lunch.
Modern cows are milked twice a day, so it's more convenient morning and evening than e.g. noon and midnight. I don't know if the cows of long ago were like that, because the whole concept of a "dairy" is sort of modern anyway. I'm similarly suspicious of this "navigation" explanation. Timekeeping is important for determining longitude, but ancient mariners didn't know how to do that.
Not the OP, but farmers tend to get up really early and have long working hours to boot. (I worked on and managed a dairy farm for a few years early in my career, plus have read about farmer life, is how I know.)
As an aside, I remember and like the point in a children's book I read as a kid, where they vacationed on a farm, and saw that the farm workers took their time about their work, did everything at a (somewhat) slow and measured pace, and still got a lot done (and well) by the end of each day. Very applicable to the modern software field, IMO, instead of the noise, flame and fury, often quickly descending to ashes, that we see a lot of nowadays.
>As an aside, I remember and like the point in a children's book I read as a kid, where they vacationed on a farm, and saw that the farm workers took their time about their work, did everything at a (somewhat) slow and measured pace, and still got a lot done (and well) by the end of each day. Very applicable to the modern software field, IMO, instead of the noise, flame and fury, often quickly descending to ashes, that we see a lot of nowadays.
JFYI, in Italian there is a saying is "col passo del contadino" that roughly translates to "at the peasant's pace" to indicate someone who is working at first sight slowly but never stops and at the end of the day has done the same or more work than someone else's that works fast but takes several pauses.
Great saying. Will look it up in Google Translate. I know a little Spanish, and Italian is somewhat similar, I guess. But didn't know those words, except can guess / figure out meaning of passo (pace?) and del (of).
Passo is actually more literally "step" in the sense of walking, "fare un passo avanti" means "making a step forward", and you would say "ha un buon passo" to mean "he is walking at a good pace", but you can use it also (like in English) outside strictly walking, coming from the very same Latin etymology (in the case of English via French):
Getting it now, thanks for the info and links. I guess then that's where the term compiler passes (strides, per the etymonline link) over source code came from too :)
>I think in English a good equivalent is "slow and steady wins the race".
It is very similar,yes, but that seems more like coming directly from Aesop's the tortoise and the hare, that in Italian would be "Chi va piano va sano e va lontano".
Cows with full udders are like humans with full bladders, only they have no way to relieve themselves. Cows with partially empty udders just stop giving milk if you don't milk them.
If I had to guess, get the most labor intensive part of the day done while the sun is still low in the sky and not as intense. Otherwise, you'd have to wait until around 3 or so before it starts setting.
Hilariously one of the most labor intensive parts of the day, bucking hay, is specifically done during the hottest part of the day. (The hay is too wet in the morning.)