The game looks good, but it makes me wonder are there any clear gameplay advantages/specialties that come from non-euclidean game "board". I mean, as long as the game forms a manifold it is locally euclidean and if we think games like snake where the very euclidean looking board loops around it still has (non-euclidean) geometry of torus.
There is a post on the blog discussing how the hyperbolic geometry affects the map generation and gameplay: http://zenorogue.blogspot.com/2012/03/hyperbolic-geometry-in... It is not up-to-date with some of the newest features, such as the Camelot quest, where you have to find the center of a circle of radius 28, and since such a circle has 31659398 cells inside, this is not trivial.
There is also an Euclidean mode, where you can see for yourself the things which do not work.
The article reads, these pyramids were close to surface and therefore were found so early on.
As for how deep does heat actually go, I would say, that if earth wouldn't have any temperature of its own, it would go all the way down. The process just takes extreme amounts of time. Empirically it takes time for earth to freeze at winter (if you live north enough) and likewise one cannot dig the ground has melted at the late of spring. Other empirical example would be rock near a campfire, they will stay warm long time after the fire goes down. Earth is just a very big rock.
While the ground doesn't freeze at Egypt, they certainly have some seasons, with different average temperatures, to warm up or cool down the deep ground temperature. So within time they should be able to see temperature differences of objects buried deep into ground. Assuming the resolution of satellites is good enough.
Other question would be how much interference does the warm sand over these objects cause. As the sand is somewhat flat, it probably has black body like radiation curve and removing it should be easy, but there always will be some static from these processes reducing the total resolution.
Well all in all, I really don't know how they do all this.
While I'm not archaeologist that sounds about right in very theoretical level. To explain this more practically it comes down to heating properties of matter.
As specific heat capacity is inverse proportional to density, sand and pyramids react to temperature changes differently. In desert temperature changes between day and night are huge causing sand and pyramids to have different temperatures. As thermal radiation is infrared in temperatures near human body temperatures (didn't check the exact temperatures but pyramids should fit in infrared spectrum), sand and pyramids will show up in different 'colors' in infrared mapping of area.
This is probably the basic idea behind these findings, of course what they are doing certainly goes beyond this level of explanation with use of infrared spectroscopy.
You got me interested. I'm personally studying theoretical physics and have studied all computational courses they give at my university. Seeing these computational tasks from other angle would certainly be pleasant experience. Can you recommend any comprehensive book about CS&E or link to some university's course listing (assuming such list has recommended readings for those courses)
Hmm, I can't think of a single general book that could be considered general CS&E. There are many great books in, e.g. numerical linear algebra, domain decomposition methods, finite element or finite volume methods, etc. While these are quite valuable, I never felt like they really changed my perspective on the field. So instead, here are some less conventional starting points.
An open source library. I learned a lot from experimenting with methods and reading PETSc source code. (And soon started developing the library too.) http://mcs.anl.gov/petsc
Algorithms like multigrid, fast multipole, and WENO that are unreasonably better than naive alternatives (for appropriate problems).
Note: CS&E is significantly bigger than partial differential equations, but PDEs are still a very central component.
If I recall right during second world war many jewish scientist emigrated from Germany to America. It was these emigrated scientist, their students and American scientist who played the scientific part of cold war. With so many new scientist moving in and political motivation to beat those communists, it sounds only natural that there was an outburst of technology at that era.
Meanwhile in northern European countries (I'm seeing this mostly in Finland's perspective) had to play nice and humble with the Soviet union it being geologically right next to it. In addition to that Finland had huge amount of war reparations to pay due to losing winter and continuation wars against Soviet Union.
Also since Soviet Union was the other big player of that time, with its own space programs and so on, it was only natural that the brightest minds in technological perspective went to Soviet universities and did their possible contributions there (I'm not expert of this matter but I remember reading there was at least some level of brain leakage during that era)
Fall of Soviet union wasn't either that good of a change for Nordic countries since Soviet Union was one of our biggest sources of export.
Of course this is all just historical blabbering the real deal being imho the fact that in Nordic countries are good places in average, which means we do well in global rankings like PISA tests, but for technological innovation and economical rise it usually is the right side of gaussian curve that is needed. Also in eyes of Finn (I really don't know how these things are in states) due to more or less powerful labor movement and being "Nordic welfare state" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nordic_welfar...) we have high labor expenses for employer. Add this to seemingly high bureaucracy to start a company, I don't see it that odd that we don't have any startup culture and every one just goes to work for Nokia (this is of course just extrapolation as there are interesting startups here and there but I feel the general culture isn't that motivating towards innovation).
