Ok, I have sent an email to Dr. Dunlap. I took the liberty of quoting the following from your comment: "the DD reactions done on the Japanese JT-60 device which WOULD, if done with a DT plasma, have achieved breakeven at 125% gain. But since they have never gone to DT plasmas on that device, because they don't have the facilities to handle T, they have not strictly broken even.". I hope that you do not mind. Hopefully he will respond soon.
If you look at the other post in this thread that I was referring to, you will see that I have reproduced the relevant part of the text. If you think that I would have a) changed the wikipedia article to agree with me, and then b) misquoted a published text... then I don't know what. You're unlikely to be satisfied with anything I might present as a source.
If you want to have a look at the book yourself, make an appointment with a physics professor at your local university. Find out who teaches nuclear and particle physics. They've probably got a copy on their shelf. Beyond that, I'm not sufficiently concerned with convincing you to put forth any further effort. Most other people seem to find that my source is adequate, and I don't actually care much about one more.
That would certainly be an adequate explanation for those dots, however it does not agree with what Dunlap says in the text. Perhaps Dunlap is himself mistaken, but since he does not cite a source for the figure, one can presume that he (or possibly a grad student of his) made it for the text, and thus he ought to understand it and know what those points actually represent. Your explanation does not, I suppose, directly contradict "Present results are in the breakeven region", but it certainly contradicts the most obvious understanding of the sentence, especially combined with the plot. You would have to understand "in the region" to mean "they would be in the region if they were done differently (with d-t instead of d-d)", which IMO is stretching things a bit.
At the same time, I can't find any evidence (with a couple of fairly cursory googlings) of an actual experiment achieving breakeven, thermalized or unthermalized. Perhaps I'll see if I can email Dunlap and ask him directly.
In that case, how do we explain the final sentence?
future developments can hope to achieve ignition.
Certainly this is not as the GGP said, that ignition is fusing any two nuclei. We most certainly have done this, so why should we "hope to achieve" it?
Furthermore, the first sentence of the next paragraph reads
In Figure 13.13 the solid region again represents ignition for a d-t reactor.
This again seems to support my interpretation. Unfortunately, I can't quote exactly what my professor said in class, but given my interpretation, if he said anything regarding ignition (which IIRC he did) it must have supported my interpretation. But I don't expect that to be a credible argument for really anyone but me since it is so vague.
Finally, the phrasing in the supposed description of thermalized breakeven is identical ("thermalized breakeven where..."), and by comparing that sentence to the first and second sentences of the paragraph, which describe unthermalized breakeven, we can presume that this sentence is in fact describing thermalized breakeven, rather than describing a condition which qualifies a particular subspace of the conditions which could be called thermalized breakeven.
Alright. My primary (meaning main, not firsthand) source is, as I said in another post, An Introduction to the Physics of Nuclei and Particles, written by Richard A. Dunlap of Dalhousie University, published by Brooks/Cole, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc., in 2004. See especially page 192. This is a standard text for an undergraduate course in nuclear and particle physics. Happy now?
Go out and get yourself a copy of An Introduction to The Physics of Nuclei and Particles by Richard A. Dunlap, first edition, published in 2004. This is one of the standard texts for an undergraduate physics course in nuclear and particle physics. See pages 192 and 193, esp. Figures 13.12 and 13.13. Then read the text on page 192. I will reproduce it here for your benefit:
In Figure 13.12 the broken line represents unthermalized breakeven. This refers to the situation where the energy output of the reactor is equal to the energy input but the plasma conditions have been augmented by neutral beam injection. The solid line represents thermalized breakeven where the plasma conditions themselves are sufficient for net energy production. The shaded region represents ignition where the energy output is not only sufficient to yield a net energy gain but is also sufficient to maintain the plasma conditions. This is a self-sustained fusion reaction. These operating conditions refer to d-t fusion; conditions for d-d fusion would follow curves with values of n\tau about two orders of magnitude larger. The data points in the figure represent the operating conditions of a number of experimental magnetic confinement reactors. The general trend of the points from the lower left to the upper right of the figure represents the chronological development of fusion reactors from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. This line also represents an increase in reactor power from the mW range to several MW. Present results are in the breakeven region and future developments can hope to achieve ignition. The time scale for such developments is presumably in the order of several decades.
The figure shows 2 points inside the solid line, and 15 points between the solid line and the broken line. Figure 13.13 on the facing page is a similar plot, showing inertial confinement experiments rather than magnetic confinement. However, 13.13 lacks the lines showing the two breakeven points.
Allow me to repeat the particularly relevant phrases (emphasis mine):
The shaded region represents ignition where the energy output is not only sufficient to yield a net energy gain but is also sufficient to maintain plasma conditions. This is a self-sustained fusion reaction.
Present results are in the breakeven region and future developments can hope to achieve ignition.
Direct from a credible source. Now, perhaps Dunlap is wrong. Credible sources have been quite wrong in the past and will be in the future. However, you'd best have a stronger argument than "no you're a poopyhead" if you expect anyone to believe you.
Achieving a net energy gain is not the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable. That has been done quite successfully. There is no problem passing break-even. It is ignition we are trying to achieve now. That is, a fusion reaction which produces enough heat to cause more fusion, provided enough fuel. If you're going to write an article about fusion, at least know something about the state of the field. Journalists should all be required to read the relevant wikipedia articles before publishing something about science.
It is the tenet that requires physical evidence of the crime be presentable before a judge before charges can be brought
Perhaps you'd better go edit the wikipedia article to agree with you then.
Wikipedia: Latin for "you [should] have the body", in common law countries, habeas corpus is the name of a legal instrument or writ by means of which detainees can seek release from unlawful imprisonment.
Nobody ever said it'd be easy. But it is not impossible. Trust me. Linux is Turing Complete TM!
Seriously, though, I'm just as sick of people saying "Oh, it is soooooo hard! I would switch if I could, but it is impossible!" Hard and impossible are not the same thing. If you're sick of windows, then make the effort to switch. If you don't want to make the effort, then quit whining about it. Fish or cut bait. That's what a grown up will do.
why would they be super aggressive? Other than selecting for fast breeding, which is selected for quite naturally in any case, I don't see how we would be making them any more prone to attacking humans or anything else. Resistant, sure. Aggressive, ??
The majority of the best scientific minds in the world are not climatologists, and therefore shouldn't be expected to know much if any more than the average joe about global warming. Not that I am saying the climatologists are stupid, just that there are a lot of other fields, many of which are quite large, and so I would be extremely surprised if the distribution of the best scientific minds was so screwy that more than half were in climatology.
That said, skepticism is a very very large part of science. And it should be. Otherwise, on the (mercifully rare) occasions when scientists do deliberately falsify things, or even just plain make a vital mistake, we wouldn't catch it. Be careful casting aspersion on those who are not yet convinced of global warming. Too much and you stray into a realm of dogma instead of science, where the scientists are the sacred keepers of unquestionable knowledge. Perhaps the people denying climate change are neither mindless nor trolls, but merely skeptics.
eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
Yes indeed. A good friend of mine, an English major, wrote an essay in high school that, IIRC, won an award and was actually published in a magazine. Later, in college, for one of her English classes, she was asked to write an essay presumably on a related topic. She reused a portion of her earlier essay as a portion of her new essay. The TA accused her of plagiarism and gave her a zero on the paper. She protested, showed the TA the actual print magazine in which her essay appeared, attributed as original work to her, but the TA refused to grade her essay nonetheless.
If it had been me, I would have gone to the professor, and failing that, to the dean. However, my friend is very nonconfrontational, and so she didn't.
Now I suppose there is the question of whether or not reusing one's own work is legitimate material to turn in for a grade, but it is most certainly not plagiarism, and turnitin.com marked it as such. Yes, since I didn't mention it above, my university does and did use turnitin.com. I'm glad I'm not writing any more essays for my classes. Peer-review physics papers are a rather different matter.
Except that you remember where the simple things in the Elementary text were, and they are generally more thoroughly explained there. That way, when you need some branch of Algebra that you haven't worked with in 5 years, you will have a quicker and easier time picking it back up with the Elementary text than with the encyclopedic one. Perhaps.
In my experience, esp. in mathematics and physics, texts are more built upon than superseded. Oh sure, occasionally they might be superseded, but, again in my experience, you'd have to sell a lot of texts back to get >$200.
The thing is, the people who are actually good at their field can't cheat, because in order to do so, they'd first have to do the work themselves so that everyone could cheat off of them, so that they would have someone to cheat off of! This is why I hate group work, especially in math classes. It winds up degenerating to a professor-sanctioned cheating session, in which I do the work I would normally do, and everyone else cheats like they normally do, except that they don't have to hide it so much.
I pride myself a great deal on never having cheated. Not once.
On the other hand, the number of MBAs who go for early retirement just because they hate their job is huge...
One of my professors, on the gripping hand, worked up until the day he died, just because he loved his job. He had plenty of money, in case that is what you are thinking.
Anybody with an ounce of sense in their head would rather do something they love than something they hate. Sure once you retire early with a big wad of cash, you can do something you like, but you've already wasted the best years of your life (20-50 or so), and what with the stress of working a job you hate, your health is not likely that great.
I doubt it. Our actual measurements of dark energy won't come under much increased doubt. Although Type IA supernovae the first (IIRC) indicator of dark energy, we still have a number of other indicators. I was just as PASCOS 2006, and saw several talks on dark energy, where various quantities related to the acceleration of the universe were really overconstrained by about 4-5 different measurements. The only one I can recall at the moment is gravitational lensing. The neat thing is that although overconstraint has the possibility to show an inconsistency, it doesn't do so here. The measurements all line up at one point (well, a distribution around one point, but that distribution is quite nicely peaked in one location, indicating consistency.).
Similarly, Type IA SN are not the only mechanism by which we measure the age of the universe, so I'm not too concerned. The other reason I'm not too concerned is that the age of the universe was already in doubt. Another talk at PASCOS dealt with something else that I can't recall at the moment (curse my memory in the morning!) that cast into simultaneous doubt all or nearly all of our universe age indicators. IIRC, according to his talk, the universe could well be 20% older than our current best estimate.
Of course, since all these are not quite my field (I was at PASCOS for the particle physics), I can't answer for whether or not these guys were just crazies and all the cosmologists were ignoring them, or if these are serious problems that will be dealt with in the next few years. I'd be inclined, however, to assume that they were quite legit.
So why is it that electric fields follow the law of superposition, which is an additive law working precisely as we said addition should thousands of years before we ever imagined electric fields? Furthermore, how is it that we can "prediscover" phenomena? We develop a model to describe existing data, and whoops!, there's another phenomenon implicit in our model, and sure enough when we look for it in reality, there it is!
This is a fairly poor summarization of the argument made by Tom Siegfried (used to be chief science writer for the Dallas Morning News, now he's somewhere else) in his book Strange Matters.
Perhaps you are right, and mathematics is just something we came up with. However, where did we come up with it from? Our brains. Our brains are part of the universe, so if the universe is goverrned by laws which can be well expressed in mathematical language, one might predict that brains would invent mathematics.
I would in fact expect that they would not take into account the hand movements. After all, as I just pointed out, the amount of hand motion varies immensely, and independently of whether or not the given action was on the mouse or the keyboard. Where can I see this study to verify whether or not they did?
The study said that in the course of doing real editing, probably of a non-technical nature, that it actually is quicker to move your hand to the mouse, because the keyboard commands are really that much less efficient.
This is not at all what you said in your first post, where you said that there are a lot of situations where the keyboard shortcut is faster, but that on the occasion where the mouse is faster, it is a lot faster. Which one did the study actually say, and which did you just pull out of the air? Or did you pull both out of the air? I would hope that a real scholarly paper would not contradict itself that blatantly, so I'll assume that the study did not say both.
Anyway, my original point was that the determining factor in whether or not a particular action is going to be faster with the mouse or with the keyboard is, in most cases, the position of your hands before the action, and the desired position of your hands after the action. I suppose that the study could very well have measured the time to perform an action with a mouse, the time to perform the same action with the keyboard, and also the times to move your hand to and from the keyboard. In that case, if we actually examined the results from such a study, we would see whether the difference in keyboard/mouse actions times was generally larger or smaller than the time of motion of the hand. We would also see whether the difference in action times is generally in favor of the mouse or the keyboard. From the general tone of your posts, I would assume that it is in favor of the mouse.
The question was not "the internet", by which I would understand IP + the actual physical network, but "the web", that is, the complicated graph with individual pages (things you can view in a browser) connected by hyperlinks (things you can click on in a browser to view something else). I use the loose definitions for pages and hyperlinks because AJAX and similar tricks complicate things as compared to a static web.
You can have either the web or email without the internet. You could send handwritten strings of hex digits via the pony express if need be, and implement TCP over that, and then web (HTTP/S) and email (SMTP) are easy. By easy I mean already done.
Email is definitely independent of the web, and vice versa. You argue that email is dependent on the internet, but it would be more accurate to say that email is dependent on some reasonable facsimile of the internet.
The trick is whether or not you have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. I have no doubt that the mouse is faster for a great many things. However, if I'm typing a 15 page paper and the sun is coming up, I don't want to jump back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse all the time. I would guess that the time to move from the keyboard to the mouse, perform one mouse action, and then move back to the keyboard is greater than the time to perform the same action using the keyboard, in the majority of cases where the mouse action itself is faster than the keyboard action itself. Now, if you do two mouse actions, then you're a little bit more likely to be faster than the keyboard. If you need to perform a whole string of actions, all or nearly all of which are faster on the mouse than the keyboard, then you should almost definitely use the mouse.
So, in using Vim, the fundamental action is typing. That is done on the keyboard. So, using the mouse in Vim doesn't make all that much sense most of the time, even when the individual actions are faster with the mouse.
Of course, the converse is true as well. If I'm browsing the web, clickety clickety, then suddenly jumping to the keyboard for the shortcut key for my homepage is kinda silly. I'm already on the mouse, so I'll use the mouse. We have duplicate methods for doing most common actions so that people can minimize their time moving back and forth from one to the other.
From looking at some of your other posts, I have come to the conclusion that you are a skillful and accomplished troll. Congratulations, sir. Have you considered joining the GNAA?
Somewhere or other, on a page which was trying to convince people to register as users on wikipedia, I read the claim that having a registered name gave you more anonymity than just using an IP address. Unfortunately, I can't remember where that was anymore, and I'm late for class so I'm not going to look it up.
No, the OP just said "The culprit is global warming", and deemed it an explanation. I was pointing out that that in itself, whether a fuller explanation exists in TFA or not, does not itself constitute an explanation. He could have said "RTFA: the culprit is global warming", or said exactly what you said, quoting the article, or done a study entirely his own and drawn these same conclusions, reporting them against all standard practices in a comment on slashdot. But, by itself, "the culprit is global warming" in no way constitutes an explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I have sent an email to Dr. Dunlap. I took the liberty of quoting the following from your comment: "the DD reactions done on the Japanese JT-60 device which WOULD, if done with a DT plasma, have achieved breakeven at 125% gain. But since they have never gone to DT plasmas on that device, because they don't have the facilities to handle T, they have not strictly broken even.". I hope that you do not mind. Hopefully he will respond soon.
If you look at the other post in this thread that I was referring to, you will see that I have reproduced the relevant part of the text. If you think that I would have a) changed the wikipedia article to agree with me, and then b) misquoted a published text... then I don't know what. You're unlikely to be satisfied with anything I might present as a source.
If you want to have a look at the book yourself, make an appointment with a physics professor at your local university. Find out who teaches nuclear and particle physics. They've probably got a copy on their shelf. Beyond that, I'm not sufficiently concerned with convincing you to put forth any further effort. Most other people seem to find that my source is adequate, and I don't actually care much about one more.
That would certainly be an adequate explanation for those dots, however it does not agree with what Dunlap says in the text. Perhaps Dunlap is himself mistaken, but since he does not cite a source for the figure, one can presume that he (or possibly a grad student of his) made it for the text, and thus he ought to understand it and know what those points actually represent. Your explanation does not, I suppose, directly contradict "Present results are in the breakeven region", but it certainly contradicts the most obvious understanding of the sentence, especially combined with the plot. You would have to understand "in the region" to mean "they would be in the region if they were done differently (with d-t instead of d-d)", which IMO is stretching things a bit.
At the same time, I can't find any evidence (with a couple of fairly cursory googlings) of an actual experiment achieving breakeven, thermalized or unthermalized. Perhaps I'll see if I can email Dunlap and ask him directly.
Certainly this is not as the GGP said, that ignition is fusing any two nuclei. We most certainly have done this, so why should we "hope to achieve" it?
Furthermore, the first sentence of the next paragraph reads
This again seems to support my interpretation. Unfortunately, I can't quote exactly what my professor said in class, but given my interpretation, if he said anything regarding ignition (which IIRC he did) it must have supported my interpretation. But I don't expect that to be a credible argument for really anyone but me since it is so vague.
Finally, the phrasing in the supposed description of thermalized breakeven is identical ("thermalized breakeven where
Alright. My primary (meaning main, not firsthand) source is, as I said in another post, An Introduction to the Physics of Nuclei and Particles, written by Richard A. Dunlap of Dalhousie University, published by Brooks/Cole, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc., in 2004. See especially page 192. This is a standard text for an undergraduate course in nuclear and particle physics. Happy now?
The figure shows 2 points inside the solid line, and 15 points between the solid line and the broken line. Figure 13.13 on the facing page is a similar plot, showing inertial confinement experiments rather than magnetic confinement. However, 13.13 lacks the lines showing the two breakeven points.
Allow me to repeat the particularly relevant phrases (emphasis mine):
Direct from a credible source. Now, perhaps Dunlap is wrong. Credible sources have been quite wrong in the past and will be in the future. However, you'd best have a stronger argument than "no you're a poopyhead" if you expect anyone to believe you.
Achieving a net energy gain is not the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable. That has been done quite successfully. There is no problem passing break-even. It is ignition we are trying to achieve now. That is, a fusion reaction which produces enough heat to cause more fusion, provided enough fuel. If you're going to write an article about fusion, at least know something about the state of the field. Journalists should all be required to read the relevant wikipedia articles before publishing something about science.
Wikipedia: Latin for "you [should] have the body", in common law countries, habeas corpus is the name of a legal instrument or writ by means of which detainees can seek release from unlawful imprisonment.
Somebody is being mis-informative. I wonder who.
Nobody ever said it'd be easy. But it is not impossible. Trust me. Linux is Turing Complete TM!
Seriously, though, I'm just as sick of people saying "Oh, it is soooooo hard! I would switch if I could, but it is impossible!" Hard and impossible are not the same thing. If you're sick of windows, then make the effort to switch. If you don't want to make the effort, then quit whining about it. Fish or cut bait. That's what a grown up will do.
why would they be super aggressive? Other than selecting for fast breeding, which is selected for quite naturally in any case, I don't see how we would be making them any more prone to attacking humans or anything else. Resistant, sure. Aggressive, ??
The majority of the best scientific minds in the world are not climatologists, and therefore shouldn't be expected to know much if any more than the average joe about global warming. Not that I am saying the climatologists are stupid, just that there are a lot of other fields, many of which are quite large, and so I would be extremely surprised if the distribution of the best scientific minds was so screwy that more than half were in climatology.
That said, skepticism is a very very large part of science. And it should be. Otherwise, on the (mercifully rare) occasions when scientists do deliberately falsify things, or even just plain make a vital mistake, we wouldn't catch it. Be careful casting aspersion on those who are not yet convinced of global warming. Too much and you stray into a realm of dogma instead of science, where the scientists are the sacred keepers of unquestionable knowledge. Perhaps the people denying climate change are neither mindless nor trolls, but merely skeptics.
If it had been me, I would have gone to the professor, and failing that, to the dean. However, my friend is very nonconfrontational, and so she didn't.
Now I suppose there is the question of whether or not reusing one's own work is legitimate material to turn in for a grade, but it is most certainly not plagiarism, and turnitin.com marked it as such. Yes, since I didn't mention it above, my university does and did use turnitin.com. I'm glad I'm not writing any more essays for my classes. Peer-review physics papers are a rather different matter.
Except that you remember where the simple things in the Elementary text were, and they are generally more thoroughly explained there. That way, when you need some branch of Algebra that you haven't worked with in 5 years, you will have a quicker and easier time picking it back up with the Elementary text than with the encyclopedic one. Perhaps.
In my experience, esp. in mathematics and physics, texts are more built upon than superseded. Oh sure, occasionally they might be superseded, but, again in my experience, you'd have to sell a lot of texts back to get >$200.
The thing is, the people who are actually good at their field can't cheat, because in order to do so, they'd first have to do the work themselves so that everyone could cheat off of them, so that they would have someone to cheat off of! This is why I hate group work, especially in math classes. It winds up degenerating to a professor-sanctioned cheating session, in which I do the work I would normally do, and everyone else cheats like they normally do, except that they don't have to hide it so much.
I pride myself a great deal on never having cheated. Not once.
On the other hand, the number of MBAs who go for early retirement just because they hate their job is huge...
One of my professors, on the gripping hand, worked up until the day he died, just because he loved his job. He had plenty of money, in case that is what you are thinking.
Anybody with an ounce of sense in their head would rather do something they love than something they hate. Sure once you retire early with a big wad of cash, you can do something you like, but you've already wasted the best years of your life (20-50 or so), and what with the stress of working a job you hate, your health is not likely that great.
I doubt it. Our actual measurements of dark energy won't come under much increased doubt. Although Type IA supernovae the first (IIRC) indicator of dark energy, we still have a number of other indicators. I was just as PASCOS 2006, and saw several talks on dark energy, where various quantities related to the acceleration of the universe were really overconstrained by about 4-5 different measurements. The only one I can recall at the moment is gravitational lensing. The neat thing is that although overconstraint has the possibility to show an inconsistency, it doesn't do so here. The measurements all line up at one point (well, a distribution around one point, but that distribution is quite nicely peaked in one location, indicating consistency.).
Similarly, Type IA SN are not the only mechanism by which we measure the age of the universe, so I'm not too concerned. The other reason I'm not too concerned is that the age of the universe was already in doubt. Another talk at PASCOS dealt with something else that I can't recall at the moment (curse my memory in the morning!) that cast into simultaneous doubt all or nearly all of our universe age indicators. IIRC, according to his talk, the universe could well be 20% older than our current best estimate.
Of course, since all these are not quite my field (I was at PASCOS for the particle physics), I can't answer for whether or not these guys were just crazies and all the cosmologists were ignoring them, or if these are serious problems that will be dealt with in the next few years. I'd be inclined, however, to assume that they were quite legit.
So why is it that electric fields follow the law of superposition, which is an additive law working precisely as we said addition should thousands of years before we ever imagined electric fields? Furthermore, how is it that we can "prediscover" phenomena? We develop a model to describe existing data, and whoops!, there's another phenomenon implicit in our model, and sure enough when we look for it in reality, there it is!
This is a fairly poor summarization of the argument made by Tom Siegfried (used to be chief science writer for the Dallas Morning News, now he's somewhere else) in his book Strange Matters.
Perhaps you are right, and mathematics is just something we came up with. However, where did we come up with it from? Our brains. Our brains are part of the universe, so if the universe is goverrned by laws which can be well expressed in mathematical language, one might predict that brains would invent mathematics.
Anyway, my original point was that the determining factor in whether or not a particular action is going to be faster with the mouse or with the keyboard is, in most cases, the position of your hands before the action, and the desired position of your hands after the action. I suppose that the study could very well have measured the time to perform an action with a mouse, the time to perform the same action with the keyboard, and also the times to move your hand to and from the keyboard. In that case, if we actually examined the results from such a study, we would see whether the difference in keyboard/mouse actions times was generally larger or smaller than the time of motion of the hand. We would also see whether the difference in action times is generally in favor of the mouse or the keyboard. From the general tone of your posts, I would assume that it is in favor of the mouse.
Where is this study? I very much want to see it.
The question was not "the internet", by which I would understand IP + the actual physical network, but "the web", that is, the complicated graph with individual pages (things you can view in a browser) connected by hyperlinks (things you can click on in a browser to view something else). I use the loose definitions for pages and hyperlinks because AJAX and similar tricks complicate things as compared to a static web.
You can have either the web or email without the internet. You could send handwritten strings of hex digits via the pony express if need be, and implement TCP over that, and then web (HTTP/S) and email (SMTP) are easy. By easy I mean already done.
Email is definitely independent of the web, and vice versa. You argue that email is dependent on the internet, but it would be more accurate to say that email is dependent on some reasonable facsimile of the internet.
The trick is whether or not you have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. I have no doubt that the mouse is faster for a great many things. However, if I'm typing a 15 page paper and the sun is coming up, I don't want to jump back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse all the time. I would guess that the time to move from the keyboard to the mouse, perform one mouse action, and then move back to the keyboard is greater than the time to perform the same action using the keyboard, in the majority of cases where the mouse action itself is faster than the keyboard action itself. Now, if you do two mouse actions, then you're a little bit more likely to be faster than the keyboard. If you need to perform a whole string of actions, all or nearly all of which are faster on the mouse than the keyboard, then you should almost definitely use the mouse.
So, in using Vim, the fundamental action is typing. That is done on the keyboard. So, using the mouse in Vim doesn't make all that much sense most of the time, even when the individual actions are faster with the mouse.
Of course, the converse is true as well. If I'm browsing the web, clickety clickety, then suddenly jumping to the keyboard for the shortcut key for my homepage is kinda silly. I'm already on the mouse, so I'll use the mouse. We have duplicate methods for doing most common actions so that people can minimize their time moving back and forth from one to the other.
From looking at some of your other posts, I have come to the conclusion that you are a skillful and accomplished troll. Congratulations, sir. Have you considered joining the GNAA?
Somewhere or other, on a page which was trying to convince people to register as users on wikipedia, I read the claim that having a registered name gave you more anonymity than just using an IP address. Unfortunately, I can't remember where that was anymore, and I'm late for class so I'm not going to look it up.
Oh gosh. I completely missed the pun. dang and it was a bad one too. grooooaaaaannnn.