Slashdot Mirror
MIT OpenCourseWare Now Online
peter303 writes "A sampling of MIT's OpenCourseWare selections appered online today. The courses cover a full range of departments, but only a couple apiece. The material ranges ranges from just syllabi and calendars to extensive on-line course notes and interative demos. To succeed, OpenCourseWare must also be an advantage to MIT faculty and students, as well as the outside world. I think this may be possible, because it gives a uniform appearance and access point for online material, plus tools to build these."
...have one more thing to spend our evenings perusing. Did you see the mathematics section??? Way to go MIT! I'll definitely be a frequent visitor.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
Does this mean students can now cheat from books when taking the exams at home?
I was eagerly awaiting the launch of this program, and unfortunately am now a little bit dissapointed. I think it is a fantastic idea in principal, but most of the classes don't seem to offer much. A handful (especially in the mathematics department) are excellent and even have videotaped lectures that can be seen online.
Others have only thin offerings, such as lecture notes alone. In some cases the lecture notes are extensive, but in others they are just minimal outlines of the lecture and are not useful if you did not attend this lecture. (These could be made useful if video lectures were subsequently provided)
I'm interested to see if other course directors follow the lead of the better prepared OCW sites. I think there is great potential, but it remains to be seen exactly how OCW will fare.
The required text is Writing Economics by Neugeboren and Jacobson. You do not need to buy it. A copy will be provided for you. You are expected to read this text and follow its instructions in the work you hand in for this class, even though we will not cover the text in detail in the lectures. Other texts you might want to consult are A Guide for the Young Economist by Thomson, The Practice of Econometrics: Classic and Contemporary by Berndt, Elements of Style by Strunk and White, Stata® manuals, and The MIT Undergraduate Journal of Economics.
Humpf. So where do I sign up for that?
I expected some DiffEqs too.
The Physics mainly contains applets.
With due respect, they're available elsewhere
too. So far, not really unique or extraordinary stuff here.
Excellent news. However, I feel it's necessary to point out that because the courseware is heavily based on the work of others, it's only proper to credit them with the naming of the courseware. I propose "Einstein/Edison/Socrates/Plato/Fermi/MIT/OpenCour seWare"
MIT's enthusiasm for this project is refreshing, and certainly quite encouraging. But online education is not particularly new, and all that MIT are adding to the mix is a qualifications system, which could certainly be quite handy.
The role of education in modern society, however, is under question, since the ability to look up facts instantly (rather than knowing them) can make people appear to be a lot smarter than they really are.
I have no problem with this. I'd rather people had common sense and an ability to use information, rather than just being a know-all.
If you need to hire a programmer to write a proprietary TCP/IP driver for your new device, you can hire someone who a) is expensive and a TCP/IP driver expert, or b) someone who is cheaper, very smart, can turn their hands to anything, and uses the Internet to research how TCP/IP drivers work. Most companies these days would choose person B.
And the main point?
Education is overrated, since anyone with a decent IQ and a large reference library (say.. the Internet) can work out how to do things that you once needed a degree to do.
mogorific carpentry experiments
1) Make a sampling of courseware available online
2) ???
3) PROFIT!!!!
Rather disappointing...
One of them is a lab and the other seems to haved little to do with Computer Science - something about transportation planning.
I would have expected the Comp Sci department to be at the forefront in this experiment in online course materials.
This looks like a good opportunity to realize your limitations. Taking courses at MIT, with the prof's, TA's, & classmates to confer with would be difficult enough.
Taking the same things remotely / autonomously sounds impossible.
When they put the courseware for St. Clair County Community College online, it might me a bit more accessible to us commoners.
Damnit, this is not just a good idea. This level of self-description should be mandatory for all universities. It's the first serious proof I've ever seen that the institution is actually doing something with all that tuition and grant money. Plus it provides a more solid basis for choosing a school than campus tours and the quality of the football team.
I think the point that they are trying to make is that you won't do well in that course if you can't write well. Which is true for many courses in University.
At least they are offering some resources which might help those who have trouble communicating well in their written work.
I guess one might argue that writing well is something that you learn by writing often. You can buy books that will help you, but this is one of those courses that you won't master through acquiring new facts from your text.
...is that the lecture notes were far more comprehensive, and intuitive than those corresponding to the same course I took at a different university. One of the things I was looking forward to about this OpenCourseWare was comparing the teaching styles of professors from different universities. I've only checked out this one course (Laboratory in Software Engineering), but so far the score is 1-0 in favour of MIT. I wish I had these online lecture notes available to me when deciding on my university. Perhaps I would have made a better decision - I've yet to finish my degree (taking at least a year off) in CS in most parts because I just didn't feel I was at the right institution. This would have played an integral role in my decision making process if all universities made this material online and publicized it.
Due to /.'s posting of two stories featuring Boston on the front page, Boston net access has slowed to a crawl. *AA's happy because the amount of p2p music trading in the greater Boston area has dimished to almost zero. "The check is in the mail, thanks Tim and Chris", stated Jack Valenty.
....hacking at MIT. Wonder if MIT hackers can create a fake page and alter the DNS entries so anyone going to the OCW page ends up at the hacked page.
It's actually quite the eye opener to be able to go through their mathematics courses and see how the material differs from the stuff they teach at my school. Most of it is pretty similar, and this certainly takes away the mystique that MIT had before I took a look at it all. I guess if your admissions standards and tuition fees are astronomically high that's enough too keep a stellar reputation.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The Copyright Law (partly) gets in the way of putting all the course materials online. The other problem is sheer volume. It's going to take awhile before they figure out how to get all the stuff up there. Some subjects will work better than others. Math will probably do well, history will probably be not so good because of percentage of copyrighted stuff used in history courses versus math courses.
It will get better and richer as they figure it out. It'll definitely be a good resource but it'll never be an MIT (TM) education.
Forgive me if this is available on the site, I might not have seen it, but is the software for creating this site available? Are there web based tools for creating the individual course pages and maintaining them? Are the eventually going to be open sourced? Does it make it easy for the professor to create the page (i.e. .doc to pdf conversion and so on)?
At my school we have a system that I assume we purhased called WebCT, and, frankly, it sucks. In fact for a supposedly technology driven school, we have some crappy resources. A bunch of sun workstations and 6 dollar copies of Windows XP, whoopteedo. I digress.
However, in my rhetoric class we handle all document management (turning in papers, journal entries, teachers notes, etc) via an online service provided by the University of Texas Austin. Aside from some really hokey things (strands of learning? that sounds rather new age) it is an interesting way to turn in papers and recieve feedback. It is pretty raw, but it has potential.
It is supposedly going to be open sourced (it is a php/mysql thing, I know because I saw the standard mysql overload page on it one day). Any other schools have systems like this? UTDallas does not, but then again, UTDallas sucks.
- to promote communication at MIT. They hope that everyone will be able to quickly find out what other people are teaching, what textbooks they're using, what's being covered, and what's not being covered.
- "open source" the resources that go into course production. Obviously, then, to make this same information available to scholars elsewhere, so that teachers at other places can see what MIT is doing and borrow resources, compare notes, make suggested changes.
- Challenge typical lecture classes. I think that they're hoping to challenge MIT faculty to think of what the 'value added' is to classes, so that people realize that learning is about more than 'dumping content' into students' heads, and consider the pedagogical use of classes more carefully.
- Provide resources for self-study. Sure-- there is a hope that someone out there in Alaska or something will take up some resources and teach themselves something.
- Challenging notions of what is university IP or not. As many know, who owns what syllabi that is produced by faculty is hairy; if MIT puts it on the web, they hope that this will deflate the whole debate, and make everyone realize that a syllabus is not synonymous with learning.
- Provide a model for the universities in online spaces. I think they're hoping that this will at least challenge people to think beyond 'how can we make a buck off putting courses online' and realize the role that universities could play in a networked age for contributing to the intellectual commons.
As I understand it, those are the purposes of open coursewear, roughly. They're really not thinking that people will train themselves so much, as they're thinking that it will help change the nature of discourse around universities in online education.http://joystick101.org getting in depth, with games.
teachers give away the amount they feel comfortable giving away. Since colleges are run like businesses, why give away something that you can charge for? You really want to learn the material? Sign up for the course. But don't expect to have everything from a certain course for free because "it's the right thing to do." Information doesn't want to be free, you just want it to be free.
I found that the material was the same, but the method of delivery was far more refined and comprehensive. I think I would have actually done much better at M.I.T. than the institution I studied at, because of this. The quality of the professors is evident in their lecture notes.
They will not get it right until they start invovling the staff in collaboration with the audience through weblogs(blogs), p2p chats and etc.
Don't Tread on OpenSource
doesn't happen over night. The simple fact that they are moving in this direction is wonderful in my opinion.
Now when do I receive my diploma in the mail for as little as $39.95 as the email stated?
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress. A diversity of approaches to problems results from a diversity of different experiences. That oddball approach some professor is teaching at a small university may just be the basis for the next important breakthrough, or at least make the school's graduates fill some important niche in science and engineering not as well filled by others.
It's like languages, cultures, genetics, and ecology: we really do lose something important when global communications carry a few dominant paradigms (or organisms) everywhere. Monocultures of the mind may be more risky and costly than monocultures of plants.
Currently at MIT doing CS Grad studies. Both of my professors are excellent lecturers and the different between them and the vast majority of my professors at my previous institution are staggering.
Humorless sig goes here.
I teach some CompSci courses in a small colombian college (its name better unknow).
<br>
Ive found that many universities put online material for students, obviously THEIR student, but anyway is on the net, and many persons, included me, use this material in order to get ideas for classes, exercises, exams, etc. <br>
Ive read some MIT courses material (from opencourseware), and it seems great, but not to much... coming from MIT...
... The plural of syllabus is syllabus (with a long U.)
It's delightful to know that people still want to make sure that knowledge will remain free.
OPEN and FREE information is. The vast majority of my college classes had comprehensive lecture notes and other reference materials (including old exams) online - getting it up there isn't hard.
The difference was that access was password protected. The University viewed the material as property and expected people to pay for the classes to have access to it. If you wern't in the class, you didn't get to look at the material. After all, if you can get the material for free, why would you pay for a distance education class?
"Back in the day" all sorts of university course and research information was available online - but then universities started taking most of it down. The information being online is unremarkable - that it's available for free is the unique part.
paintball
Will this be on the final?
I'm teaching a scientific computing (numerical analysis and programming) course at Duke right now, and I just sent links to a couple of these courses out to my students. Specifically Numerical Methods in Chemical Engineering and Linear Algebra. The former contains some good stuff, including a Matlab tutorial. The latter has Java demos including one showing an idea that I've already has a homework on (SVD). My class is already "paperless", in that the homeworks are all posted online and submitted electronically over email and grades are sent in the form of detailed reports for each student's submitted work. This fits right in with this online-only system.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Whether or not you care if it's proprietary, PDF is lame. It interrupts the online reading experience, it has accessibility problems, and it's slow to open for people with slow computers. It's also harder to re-format for most people, and it can't be read on as many platforms as HTML.
Their "Open"CourseWare is locked up in a crappy format.
Almost every computing science course I've taken, with a few exceptions, has been open-book. So reading off a book isn't cheating at all.
The idea behind applied sciences is that it's real-world preparation, and in the real world, you're allowed to look at books if you don't know how to do something.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Anyone (preferably the moderator) can explain to me why in the hell was moderated FUNNY?
Apparently not from the English department, though...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
one potential problem is the varying amounts of readings for class. A math class, with one etxt book, would be far more accessable, than say, a management or econ class with readings from a variety of journals.
Some journals are available on-line, and public libraries often have access to databases for fee-based articles, but pulling the articles togetehr will often be difficult. Compounding this is the use of case studies, which are cash cows for schools such as Harvard. What would be real helpful is the availability of inexpensive ecucational access (with limited d/ls per month to keep non-ed users out) to anyone so they could get the 50 or articles/cases they need.
Th etrade off is the potential loss of sales to traditional users (which can be as much as $20/student/qtr per class at BSchool) who get cases and articles online for less vs the addin sales potential as on-line use increases.
At least MIT is pushing in the right direction.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm taking Linear Algebra (Bates College) right now and we are using Gilbert Strang's textbook, "Introduction to Linear Algebra 2nd edition". The first section of OCW I went to was Mathematics and then Linear Algebra.. lo' and behold, 34 ~40minute long videos of Strang himself lecturing. I might not even go to my class anymore!
I've taken plenty of Distance Education courses here at SFU, and I find the staff/TA support to be exceptional. It's really nice when you're taking courses that use the opportunities distance ed offers to their full extent, because usually that means that you can reach TAs and instructors just about every day, rather than simply once or twice a week during their office hours.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Makes me wish I was eight years old
instead of 30
Especially the math/compsci stuff. See here. You can even buy an entire drive filled with all course content.
Education has always been overrated.
Horseshit.
Everybody learns at different speeds and learn faster with different methods
True. And if I want to hire someone who can assimilate information and use it fast enough to do the work I need to do, then I will probably want to hire someone who could learn and do fast enough to get through a degree program.
This is a great experiment, and the material is very useful. I'm sure I'll be using it myself in the coming years.
However, classroom learning *does not* really translate well online. Online coursework, if it's serious at all, requires a whole different approach- including several different kinds of interactivity. For MIT to offer *real* online coursework, it would require designing it specifically for that purpose, and probably producing it entirely separately. The reality is two separate universities- cyberspace and meatspace.
That said, this is still pretty neat.
Uh, sorry, but . . .
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=apiece
It seems that the lecture videos format (at least for Linear Algebra, which I checked) is Realplayer's. Anyone knows whether it'll be provided in a friendlier format as well?
Most universities have been offering online resources for students and professors. But few offer substancial material for non-enrolled students. This makes somewhat sense, because after all if you want Ivy League education you should meet all the prerequisites and pay for it.
Regardless, among the few institutions really puting what they have out there for anyone to benefit, Columbia University so far has the most to offer. Few schools come close to Columbia's Interactive department as far as content beyond an online syllabus. MIT seems to be in the right track, until they start making access to the general public impossible. I don't think it should be free (as it isn't at CI or Harvard), but at least reachable. Some other schools simply block access and give no options to outsiders/non-students.
From a purely business perspective, as some one else already pointed out, making content available to outsiders gives University recruiters a great "businesscard".
MIT has done the simple (administratively complex) task of putting all this together and putting it online at one central place.
UC Irvine has a similar effort; all UCI courses *have* to have a website with most of the course material online. I hope they see this MIT effort and take it to the next level of making it completely open and useful for the whole world.
There are twice as many courses in Ocean Engineering(?) as there are in both EE and CS (which is combined, but they are separate topics that I'm interested in, as are most people here). One of them is surely misplaced in both, this course.
--- What
..I'd enroll. I'm a smart dude - I can learn on my own, I don't need no MIT!
All the reasons you cite are good reasons for doing this. But most have to do with sharing information within MIT. Whereas the school has not only put this stuff out on the public web, they've made a lot of noise encouraging non-MIT people to come and use it.
http://ocw.mit.edu/18/18.06/f02/index.html
http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/
The layout sucks on the second one, but all the material is there.
Conclusion: MIT could have just saved money, and made an index of teacher's homepages. Or maybe they could just give teachers limited accounts - they *must* follow a template to get their homepage on the web, and then it is automatically listed. Now, if OpenCourseWare was able to make more pages, like that above page for linear algebra, for classes that wouldn't normally even have homepages that'd be something. That'd be much more useful. That would warrent the hype OpenCourseWare has recieveed - not this.
This sounds like Microsoft's commonly-touted line: "We didn't drive them out of business. Their incompetence drove them out of business." Is he teaching software engineering or business? He should stick to the former, because he's either inept or well-paid when it comes to the latter.
Their mathematices courses are a joke. You won't get away with this stuff at any European university.
I really don't think any of you have really read the mission statement of the OCI. First, these offerings are merely the pilot program. The actual site doesn't launch until next year, with the full offering not available until 2007! Second, a standards initiative driven by pedagogy rather than hardware/software vendors (read: SCORM, IMS, etc.) is also refreshing. The overwhelming knee-jerk reaction y'all express is fascinating. These materials are not meant to merely supplant or replace the classroom or institution, but to develop a means and method to share course materials. A secondary benefit would be those who choose to self-educate, but still not the goal.
I go to Pace University. Pace is a good school, but its no MIT. Anyway at Pace the professors are encouraged by the administration to put all their course info online via BlackBoard. Lots of schools use Blackboard from what I understand, but most professors hate it. First of all it means extra work for the professor and it takes time away from research, it also doesn't help students much because its essentially the exact same material we get in class via handouts, notes, dictations, or its stuff straight from the syllabus or the textbook. This MIT stuff is no different. Blackboard makes reaching your professor easier, but thats has more to do with email than anything else. This is BS.
Every 'java' is replaced by:
http://ocw.mit.edu/6/6.170/f01/tools/index.html
adds a little TM symbol to every 'java'.
Results in pages that read like Scientology Fan Fiction
Why is Triangle Man so MEAN?
On a sidenote, hope joystick101.org gets put back up, I've got a few ideas burning that are being wasted on kuro5hin.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
What was your point again?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
We have a similar thing at Cornell University called Blackboard. It's a standard interface of class websites that is maintained through the browser so any professor can do it. It isn't publically available ot the rest of the world (all pages are password protected) but most of all it's slow as hell. I don't know many people here that like it.
If MIT's page set turns out nice, is fast, and provides me another source of information in even greater detail than just HowStuffWorks.com then I think this is a great thing for all us non-MIT world members.
In terms of MIT students and faculty, these pages provide employeers a glimpse of what the course offerings really cover, hopefully conveying the idea to potential employeers of students that they truely did get a good background in the material they may claim to on their resumes'.
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
Whoa. 5.61 (quantum chemistry) looks identical to the 1990 version. Not that anything has changed in the last 12 years in undergraduate quantum chemistry, of course.
As a student in Glasgow, Scotland who received this University of Texas Austin document, badly pirated (diagrams still referred to but not included, no acknowlegement of author) as the main reference work for my relational databases class, I applaud MIT for this and look forward to enjoying their (uncredited) work in the near future. Gerald
Just wait until you hire a few people and see which ones fall apart under pressure.
A degree program proves how you managed to make it through a degree program. The lack thereof shows a lack of ability to muster all of the components of completion, ie. resources, determination, intelligence, the ability to stick with and attain a goal.
Higher education is like an obstacle course. If you want to, you can say that it trains you to get through obstacle courses. Or you can decide that if you need someone with some stamina, some ability and the desire to finish something, you might want to go looking at those who've completed an obstacle course, rather than those who could've given enough time, or a ride to the obstacle course, or long-term, low-intensity obstacle course training.
But MIT is doing two things that are real steps forward. First, they're settings standards: instructors are expected to post certain kinds of information in a standard format. Existing course web sites are just online alternatives to photocopied class handouts, and it's up the individual instructors exactly what they bother to put online and how they present it.
But what's really staggering is MIT's attitude towards public use of this material. Most course web sites are created specifically for the students taking the course -- public access is an accidental side effect, and probably wouldn't happen at all if University web sites secured their networks properly. They'd probably be taken down or hidden behind a firewall if public access started taxing the servers. Which is completely different from what MIT is doing: investing in servers and bandwidth for no other purpose than to enable public access to their content.
Netscape indeed poorly designed. IE was chosen
for incorporation within AOL instead of Netscape
because IE was designed well and had a
componentized version -- whereas Netscape
wasn't even close.
Cost them a lot of market share, a lot of business.
When I graduated from MIT back in the late '80s, none of this was as yet thought up, of course. The coursework was straight ahead, you could goof off if you didn't care and get a B, or you could put in a few hours and ace your degree - pretty much like any other school. But for my money (and it was a LOT of my money...) there is still no substitute for the personalities involved on both sides on the podium. I worked the hardest for and learned the most from teachers I really liked, regardless of subject. Hence I cannot help but to see the move to online coursework as either a second rate substitute for or an addition to an existing real class - with real people, real competition, real ideas being discussed in real time. Technical subjects benefit tremendously from peer review and interaction, two qualities difficult to find in the personalities drawn to MIT, CalTech, etc. Even in these rarified environments, one must work to seek out these beacons, for that is where the real action and learning occurs. The faculty at MIT knows this and tries to encourage interaction (however uncomfortably) among the undergraduate body. I'd give it a C until I see another reason to cheer, thought it is a good move from a philosophical POV.
About a year ago or more, I saw a show I believe was on PBS about alternative education. It covered from charter schools, to the Edison company to on-line universities and everything in between.
Included in the discussion was a Prof. from MIT talking about the "Open Sourcing" of their curriculum.
The way they layed it out at the time was fairly clear: This is not to be an online university, it is an open set of classes that a professor might use to improve or replace his existing class with.
From that view it seems they're coming along fairly well.
You learn something new every day.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
You learn something new every day, I guess.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I think that this is a great idea. All public universities should start doing it. Professors and students at any university now have more information available to them. Students can learn better and professors can teach better.
Now the next steps.
1. Start publishing textbooks online. The only people who make money off of textbooks anyway are the publishers and bookstores. Why not make the material freely available? Textbooks published by professors at public universities should be made available with an open copyright. Textbooks have become very expensive and limit a student's access to material. I used to try to read at least one other textbook in addition to the one that was assigned in class.
2. Start publishing papers online. This is the same situation. A professor writes a paper that is published in the IEEE Transactions on XXXXXX. The information is now copyrighted and I have to pay to read it. This limits a student's access to the material.
Freeing up this material and making it available electronically would have a strong effect on education and research.
No hard feelings?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I hate it when people are critical of others (especially as an AC) and in all likelihood will never do anything because that would require putting your ability, work ethic, intelligence, and funds to work. And lord knows it's easier to bitch about what someone else hasn't done than it is to get up off your AC ass and contribute. Let me guess, you're a republican.
Why not use HTML instead of PDF and PostScript? Isn't this the WWW? What am I missing? Class notes don't require 8 1/2" x 11" page layout or protection against later alteration. So why use PDFs?
Oh, and one of the PDF files lists the students' email addresses and asks that they circle their entry!-)) Gotta love it!
This seems very promising. The videos from Strang's lectures on linear algebra seemed nice as I've been reading Strang's books my self.
As some people noted, this is in no way revolutionary as practically every university has webpages for each of their courses. Atleast at the university where I'm studying (Helsinki University of Technology) we usually get good lecture notes from the lecturer as a complement to whatever book we're using, but they never get published on the course's webpage. This is unfortunate, as many other people could benefit from these lecture notes if they were put online. There's lots of good quality material in different universities and I'm grateful to the lecturers who put their notes online. When trying to learn material covered on different courses I usually make a little search on the web trying to find lecture notes of the subject.
I hope many more universities make it a policy to publish their material. I think this would also reduce the amounts of rushed or otherwise bad lecture notes, as I don't think anyone will put handwritten scanned lecture notes online, so everyone would have to typeset them on a computer. This is something you have to struggle with in the introductory math courses here at HUT...
nerdmaker.com video tutorials .net
oracle
dreamweaver
photoshop
visual basic
should there be a perl course?
is that the MIT site is really responsive, even with inevitable slashdotting. I'm impressed by how fast the pages are loading, which says something for the people who did the actual implementation. Way to go folks!
I took three calculas courses at the local commity college in high school. Didn't even cover as material as the first semester of MIT.
Well, it IS something new, but if you take a look at most courses at the websites for swedish universities, almost all info is out there already, at least at my uni.
PS - I've added you to my 'friends.' I'm assuming you don't mind.
PPS - After reading your Bio, I have to admit that, I too have only one /. account. :]
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Sadly, the Real Media streams coming off the MIT site seem to be totally unreliable. Even across a DSL line, I'm not able to get through 10 minutes without the connection (and realplayer) going belly-up. Groan. So near, yet so far.
There was an old Indian belief that by making love on the hide of
their favorite animal, one could guarantee the health and prosperity
of the offspring conceived thereupon. And so it goes that one Indian
couple made love on a buffalo hide. Nine months later, they were
blessed with a healthy baby son. Yet another couple huddled together
on the hide of a deer and they too were blessed with a very healthy
baby son. But a third couple, whose favorite animal was a hippopotamus,
were blessed with not one, but TWO very healthy baby sons at the conclusion
of the nine month interval. All of which proves the old theorem that:
The sons of the squaw of the hippopotamus are equal to the sons of
the squaws of the other two hides.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...