Who You Gonna Believe?

It seems that Anthony Watts politely disagrees with my post about the connection between oil and gas production and earthquake activity. Actually that’s not a fair portrayal of his post. It’s a hatchet job against me personally. What a nice guy.

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Sampling Rate

A reader recently asked:

T, from my mechanical engineering world we have strict rules on sampling rates vs. signal frequency rates. Ie you cannot reliably measure a 60hz ac sine wave with a 5hz analog sampling device. The result ends up being strange results that don’t show spikes well and also might not show averages well either. Can you help me understand how 120 year sampling proxies can resolve relatively high frequency temperature spikes?

This objection comes up so often from those who are accustomed to data which are evenly sampled in the time domain, and the misconception is so firmly imprinted on so many people, that it’s worth illustrating how uneven time sampling overcomes such limitations.