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Comment by NovemberWhiskey | Hacker News Reader

Oh god, I couldn't deal with having that in my floor; that tile would definitely be getting replaced.

My local grocery store has red marble flooring and one of the tiles has a ~1m diameter perfect ammonite fossil in it. It's huge and I pray they renovate the store one day cause I want to get that tile from the constructors.

Have you ever thought about just asking the owner for it in exchange for paying for a replacement tile and the labor expenses? Maybe they'd be up for it. Seems better than just hoping you notice their plans to renovate in time, or that it doesn't get shattered/damaged.

If you run across this situation, I'll buy you a new tile and take that one off your hands so I can put it in my floor.

I think this would probably be the coolest thing in my house. I'd love it.

Me neither.That is basically part of corpse in your home, right?

Limestone is generally made of dead corals and marine animals, this batch just included a slightly wider variety of species than average.

This makes it especially fun to climb on, there are pretty little shell indentations and such to appreciate on your way up.

The magic ingredient in concrete is cement and the magic ingredient in cement is limestone, so our cities are literally built out of bones. Sleep tight.

Interesting. Cities are built on death and suffering, literally and figuratively.

Much (most?) of the entire biosphere of earth comes from billions of years of life forms killing and eating other life forms.

The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways, but quite gnarly.

  > The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways, but quite gnarly.

It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

Unless you're a primary producer (photosynthesize your own food, or something of the sort), all life is built on death and suffering. We eat what we kill.

except, hooray for parasites and scavengers!

... in fairness, there's not really any particular reason to believe that the organisms which contributed to limestone suffered any more than their peers who didn't. And insofar as all the elements that are components of life exist in finite quantities which get recycled on earth, all life is built on death.

this is a mistake i made for many years, so hopefully i can save someone else: bones and teeth are calcium phosphate, while corals and seashells and eggshells and limestone are calcium carbonate. that's why you can't dissolve teeth or chicken bones in vinegar. cement is made by calcining calcium carbonate (with silicates), not calcium phosphate

mineral calcium phosphate (apatite) is broken down for fertilizer with sulfuric acid. it is not used for cement to my knowledge

the phosphate and carbonate of calcium are not especially similar, not any more than the hydroxide and sulfate of sodium, or the sulfide and hydroxide of iron

in summary, your cities are not literally built out of bones

Valid point, but let's tease that apart: We're talking about seashells and coral, not the sort of bones you'd find in a mammal, but still the skeletal structures of animals. So maybe "skeletons" not "bones". Same difference.

true, your cities are literally built out of skeletons

> so our cities are literally built out of bones. Sleep tight.

They moved the cemetery but they left the bodies!

Yep. I have a few seashells poking out of my bathroom tile. It’s not (ugly) travertine though.

Uh, sure, but that doesn't look like "an identifiable part of a human head" that's going to be catching your eye when you're using the bathroom.

It's not uncommon to build using human remains or on top of the human remains. Quite a few plague pits got uncovered in London in recent years by developers wanting to build on whatever scrape of land they can find. Developers are required to allow some time for researchers to go through the site before they are free to then pour concrete over them and erect their towers.

I live in a city that was founded by the Romans around the time of Christ. But has been abandoned and rebuild a couple of times (by a.o. Charlemagne). Everytime something is built, dug, or torn down, they find old or ancient foundations. Sometimes underneath old foundations. Fortresses underneath mideaval cellars, city walls below a casino. A Bathouse in a parking garage.

It makes building stuff, quite cumbersome. And I can only imagine the amount of ancient foundations that have been quickly eradicated, so that a real estate developer could keep on schedule to maximize profits.

Same. I would look at that every time I was in the bathroom and wonder how they died. Did they suffocate from toxic gasses while exploring a cave? Maybe it was more gruesome like falling into a hot spring and getting boiled to death...

It would bother me forever.

100%. No issue with someone else having it in _their_ house, but it'd horrify me to have that in my house

This is honestly either shitty workmanship or bad luck. They should have noticed this and swapped it for another tile during construction. Either the installer wasn’t looking at what they were doing (apathy) or there were other tiles with more obvious “flaws” and they ran out of spares.

But then I don’t think I want limestone in my bathroom in the first place.

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