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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Remarkable that a ceramic pot could have survived for 2,500 years. I break cups all the time.

There's a permanent display of Eastern ceramics at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK) which has some incredibly old pieces. Worth visiting even if you know nothing about pottery. https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about-us/collections/arts-of-as...

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That a specific ceramic pot survives is very unlikely, but some surviving it of a huge group less so. I guess you also have some cups left in your cupboard!

This of course is the statistical view point. On another level, seeing artifacts survive for thousands of years is fascinating and awe-inspiring.

This is the statistical long tail indeed. I would also expect that a lot of these vases were buried in soil or on the sea floor where they were undisturbed for many years.

I was fighting with someone about this exact concept for hours.

They kept exclaiming how amazing it was that we (as specific people) were born and how infinitesimal the odds were.

Roll 12 6-sided dice in turn, record the sequence. What are the chances that specific sequence should be rolled? Less than 1 in 2 billion. Anything remarkable about that? Clearly not.

If your counterpart thinks otherwise, well…

That museum as a whole is great. It’s got a bit of loads of different things but it is a much more manageable size than the big museums in capital cities / New York.

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