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Comment by joncrane | Hacker News Reader

Ha, good point. We had relatives back in the States that were expecting something to bury so I was stuck.

You could have burned something else of similar volume, maybe a load of his clothes, and put it in an urn.

Cremains are kind of distinctive, though. In fact, once you know what they look like you can find them at waterfalls and mountain tops all over the place.

err... Not sure if i should google or not...

Edit: got curious. I guess it's just white/pale ash?

It has little chunks, maybe 3 or 4 millimeters wide, where you can see the spongy, internal structure of the bones.

I heard that used to be true for older cremations, but not for newer ones (due to higher heat & efficiency) ?

Interesting. Maybe someone can chime in on how it would be different from ash at the center of a fire pit?

Last time I saw a dateable sample (i.e. straight from the crematorium vs. at a mountaintop or waterfall) was about nine years ago, and it was quite chunky. This was from a crematorium in Arizona that was presumably using modern methods. I do recall that there was an episode of a TV show a while back (Dexter?) where someone did an ashes swap and it was discovered because the ashes looked like they were from the 70's, but that could have just been something the writer dreamed up.

You can almost imagine an eccentric subculture rife with debate over the preferences and arguments in favor of the virtues distinctive degrees of granularity in cremated human ashes, not unlike peanut butter varieties.

The defining aspect of the argument being whether you can tell the ashes came from a human, or whether you'd rather not know, or care to think about it.

The show was "six feet under"

Watch the movie "Meet the Parents" ("dinner scene"). It's funny, but you can skip to 2:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pctsr5jf0Pw

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