Sampling Artifacts & Signal Distortion

Primes about how encoding, sampling, and transmission introduce artifacts absent from the original signal, including aliasing, discretization artifacts, harmonic distortion, compression, evidence-fidelity decay, and rate coding's frequency-based representation.

7 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Aliasing — Sampling a signal below the rate its information content demands folds distinct high-frequency states onto identical low-frequency ones, fabricating false structure that masquerades as real signal.
• Compression — Reduce redundancy.
• Discretization-Induced Artifact — Converting a continuous quantity into discrete buckets produces apparent structure that is a property of the bucket boundaries rather than of the underlying phenomenon.
• Distortion — Systematic, mapping-induced deviation of an output from a faithful rendering of its input.
• Evidence-Fidelity Decay — Delay between event and capture lets backfill silently fuse observation, inference, and reconstruction into one uniform record.
• Harmonic Distortion — Passing a signal through a nonlinear transfer function generates new frequency components — harmonics and intermodulation products — absent from the input, an artifact of the nonlinearity itself rather than of any sampling or discretization.
• Rate Coding — A continuous magnitude is represented by the frequency of identical discrete events, decoded by integration over a window that trades latency against precision.