Do you mean power or energy??

Now and then a person who can speak with authority should do it. This blog has entertained you(we hope) with chit-chat for more than half a year. It is time for the emeritus professor to say something worthwhile. It is also hoped that someone knowledgeable can clear one of his nagging doubts.

Setting the stage, consider the following: all night we leave on a CFE (compact fluorescent emitter) rated at 11 watts to help yours truly to find the bathroom without his glasses. Suppose he gets the recommended eight hours of rest; thus, the energy expenditure for the night light is 11 watts times 8 hours, or 88 watt-hours of electrical energy. It turns out that watt-hours are impractically small; we are charged for kilowatt hours, so we move the decimal point left three places and say we used 0.088 kwh. If we are billed 10 cents per kwh, our cost for the night light is less than a penny.

People who newly f ind out you are from California very quickly ask "What about all those earthquakes?" Okay, I have lived in Northern California for more than fifty years. In that time, I have felt about three shakes. About 1960, I was seated at my desk in the Hansen Labs and the floor felt like it was bucking up and down. I heard no more about it, so I guess it was not newsworthy. In the past year, I felt one jolt and the pendant hanging on the mirror was going click-click. I googled geological survey and they said it was near where my sister-in-law lives, 50 miles away. They had not felt anything. During the 1989 World Series, I was at my desk in Sacramento, preparing for my graduate lecture, and my tummy felt a little funny. It broke the Oakland Bay Bridge and postponed the A's humiliation of the Giants for a week. The quake epicenter was over 100 miles away but a number of my neighbors had tsunami's in their swimming pools that sloshed out half the water.

Now, a Cal Tech geophysicist named Richter invented "seismographs", which I understood to measure "intensity" of the quake. Newscasters try to speak of the "energy" using the Richter scale. If it is indeed "energy" that is quoted, there must be some way of factoring in the duration of the shaking. Somebody who knows, clue me in, that I may popularize it to my five readers.