Botts’ Dots

The originals were round; the square reflectors were developed later.

If his name had been Chadwick or Gormley or Jones, it’s doubtful that anyone would associate the man with his achievement.  As it is, Dr. Elbert Botts doesn’t exactly rank with Sir Isaac Newton and Bill Gates among the giants of science and technology.  His invention was the raised pavement markers that separate traffic lanes on streets and highways; because of the coincidence of his name and their shape, they have become widely known as Botts’ Dots.

In the 1950s, Botts was employed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) at a testing lab in Sacramento.  Painted lines tended to disappear in rain or darkness, and had the additional disadvantage of requiring frequent repainting, so Botts began searching for a safer and more durable alternative.

He came up with the idea of the little ceramic domes, but then had to figure out a way to attach them to the pavement; his first thought was to use spikes.  If you or I had been working in the lab with him, we’d probably have said, “Really, doc?  You want to put a bunch of nails in the road?”

That idea was soon scrapped and various formulas of epoxy were tried.  Eventually one was found that permanently adhered the lane markers to asphalt or concrete.  The next step, apparently, was to stuff the entire concept in a file drawer and forget about it.  Elbert Botts had come up with the idea in 1953, but it wasn’t until 1966 that the dots were finally put into use on California freeways.

An additional benefit of Botts’ Dots was discovered soon thereafter.  When a driver is drowsy or preoccupied with yelling at the kids in the back seat, the raised markers announce that the car is drifting into the adjoining lane.

They are now widely used throughout the world, except in areas that get a lot of snowfall.  The equipment that removes snow from roadways also tends to scrape off Botts’ Dots.  According to the Caltrans website, “There are an estimated 20 million Botts’ Dots in place today” — and that’s just on freeways and highways in California.

Unfortunately for the heirs of Dr. Botts, the legend that he got a small royalty per dot and therefore became fabulously wealthy is untrue.  In fact, Elbert Botts died in 1962, before the pavement markers that bear his name were put into use.  He never knew that his innovation was successful, or that they gave him a bit of immortality.

As durable as they initially proved to be, the increase in the volume of traffic since the dots were introduced has reduced their life span.  In some places they still last for over ten years, but on heavily-traveled sections of road, they now have to be replaced after only a few months.

Although it insists that Botts’ Dots “will be with us for a long time,” Caltrans has begun experimenting with longer-lasting, higher-visibility alternatives.  Among them are reflective strips that are essentially baked onto the roadway.  It’s probably too much to hope that the chief engineer on that project is named Parker… you know, so that someday we’ll call them “Parker’s Markers”.

The Big Picture on Popcorn

At the movies, this much popcorn will cost at least six dollars.

It’s a question that has occurred to me several times in my adult life, but I’ve never had the chance to ask it.  That’s partly because “farmer” is the occupation of only 1% of the U.S. work force, so there aren’t many opportunities to encounter one.  When I do, though, I’ll dispense with the pleasantries and get right to it:  “How do you decide what crops to grow?”

“Betting the farm” is an expression gamblers use, meaning “to take a big risk.”  Farmers literally bet the farm every year, and I’d be fascinated to find out how one figures out that the best use of his land and resources is, say, popcorn.

Presumably the soil type and weather conditions are part of the equation, but when his neighbor is able to grow sweet corn, what makes a farmer think, “Nope.  I’m going with popcorn.”

Most of the world’s popcorn production is in the United States, and there are at least 6 cities that claim to be “The Popcorn Capital of the World”.  All are in the Midwest, far from Hollywood, where popcorn’s constant companion — movies — are made.

Popcorn has actually been around a lot longer than movies; Smithsonian scientists have found evidence in Peru of popcorn that dates back over 6,000 years.  It wasn’t until the late 19th century that commercial popcorn poppers were invented, though, and someone thought, “Hey, you know what would go great with this stuff — moving pictures!”

Well, the connection between popcorn and movies was a little more complicated than that, but one of the factors is what the popcorn producers call “expansion ratio”.  That refers to the increase in volume that occurs when those little kernels are popped; a good expansion ratio is in the neighborhood of 40 to 1.

Why does that matter to movie theater owners?  Because they buy popcorn by weight and sell it by volume, so the higher the expansion ratio, the higher the profit.  And popcorn is a more important income source to theaters than ticket sales.

Ticket revenues have to be split with the films’ distributors, but exhibitors pocket 100% of concessions.  According to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, concessions account for about 20% of movie theater gross revenues — but 40% of profits.

By the way, the stuff that makes movie popcorn taste so good – the butter-flavored motor oil they drizzle on it, for instance — adds so much fat that a good-sized tub of it is said to be comparable in fat grams to several Big Macs.

On the other hand, pure unadulterated popcorn — the less tasty version — is actually good for your health.  A study completed in 2012 showed that in addition to its high dietary fiber, popcorn has levels of antioxidants that are greater than some fruits and vegetables.  However, the study’s author, Dr. Joe Vinson, warned that adding too much butter and/or oil could negate the health benefits.

Here’s what occurred to me, though.  A previous scientific study found that there are health benefits associated with chocolate (see my blog post “Rx: Chocolate”, 10/26/11).  Just go with me on this.  If popcorn and chocolate were combined… huh?  Sounds good, right?  Maybe Harry and David’s Moose Munch will prove to be about the healthiest thing we can eat!

Dr. Seuss and Dr. Suess

Dr. Eduard Suess (1831-1914)

It seems unlikely that Dr. Seuss, the beloved author of children’s books, and Dr. Suess, the beloved Austrian geologist, ever met.  That is speculation on my part, but since the scientist who published Das Antlitz der Erde died when the Cat In The Hat writer was only ten years old, I feel like it’s a reasonable assumption.

The guy who was the expert on the Alps had a son who was also a geologist and professor, but there’s no evidence that this second Dr. Suess had any contact with the Dr. Seuss who created the Grinch.  By the way, the children’s book writer and illustrator had no children of his own.

His real name was Theodor Geisel, and I thought maybe he had borrowed the geologist’s name, making a slight alteration in the spelling.  As so often happens, I was wrong.  Seuss was his mother’s maiden name, and his middle name.  Oh, and the family pronunciation of the name rhymed with “voice”, not “goose”.

While a student at Dartmouth, Ted Geisel worked on the school’s humor magazine.  He and several of his pals got caught drinking gin, and since this was the mid-1920s, they were breaking the law — Prohibition was in effect.

As punishment, a dean booted them out of all extracurricular activities.  Geisel continued to contribute cartoons to the humor magazine, though, using pseudonyms like L. Burbank, D.G. Rossetti… and Seuss.  The Doctor part was added later on.

His first children’s book was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which made it to print in 1937 after being rejected by dozens of publishing companies.

Following a stint as a political cartoonist during World War II, Geisel returned to writing children’s books.  Scholars point out that there was political content in some of them, too.  For instance, “Horton Hears a Who!” was an allegory for democratization in post-war Japan, as any five-year-old can tell you.

Dr. Seuss had 46 children’s books published; so far they have sold over a half-billion (with a B) copies.

Dr. Suess was not quite as successful.  The Austrian’s masterwork, which translates into English as The Face of the Earth, is a massive multi-volume work that deals with the geologic structure of our planet.  In the early 20th century it was considered a textbook, but copies of The Face of the Earth are now repositories for much of the earth’s dust.

In 1857 Dr. Suess published a slender book called Die Enstehung der Alpen (“The Origin of the Alps”).  The movie rights remain unsold, but Eduard Suess’s theories established the concept of tectonics, which has to do with movements of the earth’s crust.

This Dr. Suess (the U-before-E one) had a grandson named Hans, who became the third Dr. Suess.  A chemist and nuclear physicist, Hans Suess was one of the founding faculty members of University of California, San Diego.  His personal papers are housed at UCSD’s Geisel Library, which is named for one of its major donors, Theodor Geisel — yeah, Dr. Seuss.

If you aren’t confused yet, consider the fact that there is a German physicist named Theo Geisel (no relation).  I was able to learn that Dr. Geisel is also a musician, but couldn’t determine if he likes Green Eggs and Ham.

The Solar System Gets a Makeover

This is how the solar system looked when I was a kid.

Don’t feel bad if you missed it.  You had a lot going on, what with the holiday and all, so when astronomers announced recently that the dwarf planet Makemake has no significant atmosphere it must have slipped past you.

At least you knew there is a dwarf planet called Makemake, and that it’s pronounced “MA-kay-MA-kay”.  I’m ashamed to admit that I was ignorant of its existence.

When I was a kid, there were nine planets and we could name them in order, based on their proximity to the sun.  There was Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.  Then came the asteroid belt, a name that generated much schoolboy humor.

Beyond that were the massive Jupiter, ringed Saturn, Uranus (another source of childish jokes), Neptune, and finally Pluto.  That was the lineup until a few years ago, when the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, recategorizing it as a “dwarf planet”.

Pluto had only been discovered in 1930, so it didn’t get to hang out with the varsity planets very long.  Its name, by the way, was suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in England who obviously had some experience with unusual names.

In classical mythology, Pluto was the Latin name for the ruler of the underworld.  It wasn’t until several months after the naming of the planet that Walt Disney appropriated the name for the beloved cartoon dog character.

Anyway, at the time astronomers found it, Pluto (the planet) was believed to be about the same size as Earth.  As telescopes and technology have improved, though, scientists realized that it is less than 20% as big as the planet we call home.

By focusing their attention in Pluto’s part of the universe during the early 1990s, astronomers discovered something now known as Kuiper’s belt (to my knowledge, no Disney character has been named “Kuiper” yet).  Within that band of ice and rocks 3 billion miles or so from the sun, other petite planets were seen.

With these developments, the International Astronomical Union decided it was time to render my astronomy textbooks obsolete.  As mentioned, Pluto was downgraded in 2006, and at the same time, an asteroid known as Ceres was upgraded to dwarf planet.  Another orbiting object that was discovered in 2005 and subsequently named Eris is categorized that way, too.

In 2008, the IAU dwarf planet collection added Haumea, named for the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, and Makemake, a name given by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island to their god of fertility.  It’s a long way out there — Makemake completes an orbit around the sun every 310 years, give or take.

As of today, then, the solar system floor plan is down to eight planets and their moons, and five official dwarf planets, with several more awaiting confirmation by the IAU.

Oh, and if you’re concerned about the news from Makemake, Science.com reports that “although this icy world currently lacks an atmosphere, there is still a chance it could form one.”  Keep your fingers crossed!

Back to Standard Time

A finger in each hemisphere at the prime meridian, Greenwich

Attention, U.S. residents:  You’re about to regain the hour you lost last spring.  That’s because we’re no longer going to be saving daylight; we’re returning to standard time soon.

Resetting clocks every few months has its annoyances.  If you forget to change back to standard time in the fall, you might turn on your TV and discover that you’ve missed the first hour of that game you wanted to see.  When clocks “spring forward” in the spring, people who make a habit of arriving at church fashionably late are chagrined to find that they’re going to have to endure the entire service.  Those who live in Arizona or Hawaii have no excuse for being late or early, since they observe year-round standard time.

“What time is it?” has become an increasingly complicated question.  Back when people used sundials to determine local time, villages that were only a few miles apart had different opinions of when noon was.  It didn’t matter much, though, since one rarely visited that neighboring village.

With the growth of international trade and travel, there was a greater incentive to get on the same schedule.  Greenwich Mean Time was an attempt to get the world to synchronize its watches, so to speak.

The general idea is that there is a one-hour difference for every 15 degrees of longitude.  The so-called prime meridian — 0° longitude — runs through Greenwich, England, which is not very far down the Thames from London.  The location of the prime meridian was arbitrary, of course, but in 1884 an international conference decided to humor the Brits and let them think the world’s day started there.

It’s probably worth noting that the one hour = fifteen degrees concept gets ignored in a lot of places.  China, for example, has one time zone for the entire country, which covers 60 degrees of longitude.  Like most Asian and African countries, the Chinese don’t bother with daylight saving time, either.

The idea of adding an hour of light at the end of the day during summer months wasn’t seriously considered until the late 19th century.  It was implemented during World War I as a way to conserve energy resources, and has been repealed and resumed many times since.

In 1966, the U.S. government tried to simplify things by establishing the Uniform Time Act.  One of its provisions was that clocks were set forward on the last Sunday in April and returned to standard time on the last Sunday in October.  States were allowed to opt out of daylight saving time, provided the entire state did so.  The Act has been amended several times since, including an experiment with year-round DST during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.

The most recent change to the law took effect in 2007, when the beginning of daylight saving time was moved to the second Sunday in March and the ending was pushed to the first Sunday in November.

One of the arguments for reverting to standard time after Halloween was that kids could then do their trick-or-treating during daylight hours.  Seriously.  There may be a lot of studies that support that view, but based on anecdotal evidence — the traffic at my front door — kids still show up after dark.  That’s just an hour later than it used to be.

Can’t Complain

Gottfried Franz, “Munchausen Riding the Cannon Ball”

Did you ever stop to consider how many body parts you have?  If you’re a medical student you probably not only know the exact number, you can give all their Latin names.

Most of us, though, would guess several hundred or even several thousand, taking into account that our parts have parts.  For instance, there’s the ear — that’s a part.  But it has the pinna (also known as the auricle), which is the outer flap that the barber trims around.  Then inside there’s the eardrum and the cochlea and the eustachian tube and some other stuff, so there are lots of parts within that part we call the ear.

When we apply that to the entire body, we can reliably estimate that the total number of anatomical parts is… well, a lot.  (As you can probably tell, I was not a science major.)  And not to be excessively gloomy, but for every single part, there are about a half-dozen things that can go wrong with it.

That’s why it is semi-miraculous that while every one of us has some sort of ache or pain or condition for which we are being treated, we are running at least as well as our automobile, which has a similar number of parts.  When an acquaintance asks, “How are you?” we’re usually able to reply “fine” without stretching the truth too far.

What got me thinking about all this was when I learned that, with all of the potential things that could go wrong with a body, there are people who resort to imaginary ailments to get attention.  There’s a name for this condition:  It’s called Munchausen syndrome.

MayoClinic.com describes it as “a serious mental disorder in which someone with a deep need for attention pretends to be sick or gets sick or injured on purpose.”

It should be noted that Munchausen syndrome isn’t the same thing as hypochondria.  “People with hypochondria truly believe they are sick,” according to the Mayo Clinic staff, “whereas people with Munchausen syndrome aren’t sick, but they want to be.”  Which, when you think about it, is sick.

Symptoms include frequent stories about medical problems that are embellished with dramatic details, and eagerness to undergo medical tests and operations.  Some even inject themselves with bacteria or toxic substances to make themselves sick.  Yeesh.

The doctor who first identified this condition named it for Baron Munchausen, an 18th-century German nobleman who told stories of his adventures and exploits that bore little connection to reality.  Among his tall tales was a story about narrowly escaping injury during a battle by hopping onto a cannonball and riding it.  Nope, I’m not buying it, Baron.  You just can’t do something like that without harming some of those many body parts we have.

Just among friends, we’ll probably admit to each other that not all of our thousands of parts are still functionating at 100%… but since we don’t have any imaginary illnesses, we can’t complain, right?

Talking Trash

It’s out there… circling…

From things I’ve read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I pictured a huge island of beer cans and disposable lighters and tires.  It’s the size of Texas, some reports say, while others have it twice the size of Texas.  For some reason, Texas always seems to get dragged into this comparison.

That’s unfair to the Lone Star State for several reasons, not least of which is that no one knows how big that concentration of marine debris really is.  There are no panoramic pictures of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from aircraft or satellites, because it’s not the big blanket of trash on the ocean’s surface that I had imagined it to be.

Oh, there’s plenty of junk out there, but most of it is small bits of plastic debris — poisonous confetti.  A lot of it is floating just below the surface, making a sort of underwater haze that is not visible from above.

There are certainly areas within the garbage patch that have tangles of fishing nets and bleach bottles and ice chests, but the edges of the entire patch are not clearly defined.  Now, here are some short answers to questions that occurred to me about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch…

Where is it?  It’s in what scientists call the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, and has accumulated there due to the circular currents of the North Pacific Gyre.  That clears it up, right?  OK, let’s put it this way — there are a couple of distinct patches of trash.  The Eastern one is about halfway between California and Hawaii; the Western one is swirling between Japan and Hawaii.  Heads up, Hawaii!

What is it?  As mentioned above, there is an assortment of crud, most of which is plastic.  It was once in the form of grocery bags or drink cups or pill containers or water bottles; this junk degrades into smaller pieces, but doesn’t lose its toxicity.  Small marine organisms ingest it, then fish consume them.  Eventually that polyethylene terephelate works its way up the food chain, winding up in your fish-and-chips dinner.

How did it get there?  Some of it comes from recreational boaters and other vessels — cargo ships drop thousands of containers into the sea each year, and cruise ships dump tons of solid waste every week.  But the vast majority of ocean garbage — something like 80% — started on land.  Wind and rivers and storm drains carry it to the coast and into the sea.

No one is blaming you personally, because you’re very conscientious about recycling, but a lot of people aren’t.  According to Smithsonian.com, about 3 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water worldwide.  Unfortunately, a lot of those bottles find their way into the ocean, and a lot of bottle caps find their way into fish and birds.

What can we do about it?  There’s really no way to vacuum up the stuff that’s already out there.  As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration points out, “straining ocean water for plastics… would capture the plankton that are the base of the marine food web and responsible for 50% of the photosynthesis on earth.” 

For now, the best we can do is to not add to the problem; get your friends to be as good about recycling those water bottles as you are.  By the way, a garbage patch has also formed in the Atlantic Ocean –  it may not be the size of Texas yet, but it’s a whole lot bigger than Rhode Island.  And growing.

Giddyup, Seahorse!

A tank at Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm, Hawaii

Seahorse racing will never become a popular spectator sport.  There are many reasons for that, not least of which is that they are terrible swimmers.  Your average seahorse can only go a few feet before it has to stop and hang on to something while it rests.

You wouldn’t be able to fill a huge stadium for seahorse races either, since they are only a few inches in height, with the largest variety topping out at 8 inches.  That would make them hard to see from a grandstand.

The truth is, they’re pretty hard to see even when you’re in the shallow water around sea grass beds or coral reefs where they like to hang out.  I’ve been in their habitat quite a bit over the years, but the first time I encountered an actual living sea horse was at the Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii.

As the name suggests, seahorses are bred there.  By the way, when you’re having that birds-and-bees discussion with your kid, you might not want to confuse them just yet by including the details of how seahorses breed.  It’s complicated, since the daddy seahorses are the ones that get pregnant.

OK, that’s not literally true, but the males do have a brood pouch on their front, into which the female deposits hundreds of eggs.  At some point during that transfer the eggs are fertilized. 

During the gestation period, mom drops by every day for a few minutes to say “hi”, and then swims away.  Dad resumes his quest for food, since he’s eating for several hundred.  In a few weeks, sea ponies emerge from the pouch.

No matter how frisky the seahorses are, they are not reproducing fast enough to keep pace with conditions that are causing the seahorse population to dwindle.  Habitat destruction is a factor, and overfishing is, too.  It’s estimated that as many as 20 million seahorses are caught and sold annually, mostly for use in traditional Chinese medicine.

As far as I know, the Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm is not supplying critters for that purpose, but is helping to meet worldwide demand from aquariums and hobbyists.  That cuts down the number of seahorses that are taken from the wild, and is a step toward preventing their eventual extinction.

The people who operate the Ocean Rider aquafarm maintain high standards of hygiene to keep the little guys healthy.  Before we entered, we scrubbed up like we were doctors going into a… well, a delivery room.

The highlight of our visit was a hands-on experience.  It took a little time for the seahorse to warm up to me, but eventually he wrapped his prehensile tail around my little finger. 

Our guide told me that this seahorse was named Barney, and that at age 13, he was the oldest in the aquafarm.  So we two old guys hung out for a while; then Barney paddled away, probably hoping to find a seamare and offer to carry her eggs.

Calorific!

Dr. Wilbur Atwater, Calorie Expert

There aren’t many words in the English language that end with I-E.  There’s brownie, movie, eerie, zombie, prairie, wedgie, genie, bookie… OK, so there are more than I thought.

What I had previously believed to be a rare example of a word ending in I-E is calorie.  It entered the language in the 19th centurie (sorry, century) thanks to a French scientist named Nicolas Clément.  He defined it as a unit of heat, and derived “calorie” from the Latin word calor, which means… right, heat.

Clément’s calorie was the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of water by 1° centigrade.  That kind of calorie (a.k.a. the small calorie) still has some scientific applications, but the kind we have all learned to dread is actually a kilogram calorie — 1,000 small calories.  To avoid confusion, the food-energy calorie is often capitalized, which I’ll start doing now.

The Calorie (a.k.a. the large calorie, or in Europe the kcal) was popularized, if that’s the right word, by an American professor of chemistry at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.  At the end of the 19th century, Wilbur Atwater invented a device he called the respiration calorimeter, a chamber he used in experiments to basically measure the balance between food intake and energy output of his test subjects.

Atwater and his colleagues gave the subjects precisely measured portions of food.  Then the subjects, students who stayed in the little chamber for days at a time, would ride a stationary bicycle or perform other tasks.  The calorimeter evaluated the heat that the subjects generated.  The energy needed to increase one kilogram of water by 1° centigrade came to be known as a Calorie, thanks to articles Wilbur Atwater wrote for national publications in the U.S.  The general populace caught on to the notion that all kinds of foods had nutritional values that could be expressed by numbers.

Atwater got himself in hot water, so to speak, with temperance groups because he felt duty-bound to report his finding that alcohol had some nutritional value.  That fact was soon included in the advertising of companies that made liquor. 

Professor Atwater died in 1907, but his pioneering work was carried on by a Wesleyan co-researcher named Francis Benedict.  The book Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, written by Andrew F. Smith, mentions one of Benedict’s proudest achievements.

He developed a calorimeter, the book says, “large enough to hold twelve Girl Scouts for an extended period of time.”

I had no idea that Girl Scouts of long ago had a role in establishing the Calorie as a scientific unit, but I’ve been aware that their Girl Scout cookies had a role in the extra calories I’m wearing around my waist.  Oh, yeah… and come to think of it, cookie is another I-E word.

Older Than Dirt

Tourists visit Akrotiri excavation site -- Santorini, Greece

Nothing will spoil your day like the eruption of a nearby volcano, causing tons of ash and rock to rain down on you.

As you know, the most famous calamity of that sort was at Pompeii, in southern Italy, when Mount Vesuvius blew its top in A.D. 79, killing hundreds almost instantly.  (Ironically, one woman had just said about her neighbor’s attire, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit.”)

A much more powerful event — perhaps 100 times bigger — happened on the Greek island of Santorini, also known as Thera.  In fact, the island itself was the volcano.  When seen from the air, or from the little town of Fíra perched on top of the island, the caldera is apparent.  It must have been one hellish explosion, and it buried the town of Akrotiri, on the southern end of Santorini, for about 3,500 years.

Akrotiri was a Minoan community — Crete is roughly 70 miles away — and the residents were busy making stuff with their Bronze Age tools when the ground began to rumble and then spewed fire.  Scientists disagree about the date; opinions range from around 1500 B.C. to one guy who insists it was exactly 1646 B.C.  He bases that on ice core dating, and a Members Only jacket found in the rubble.

The site was discovered in the 19th century by workmen who were quarrying pumice to make cement for construction of the Suez Canal.  Systematic excavation by scientists didn’t really get going until 1967, though, and to be honest, “systematic” may be a generous characterization of the process.  When we visited in the 1990s, archaeologists were only able to dig about one month out of the year due to lack of funding.

Still, they have found some fascinating stuff under all that old dirt:  lots of pottery, furniture and walls decorated with beautiful frescoes.  The residents of Akrotiri weren’t living in huts by any means – some of the buildings had multiple stories (see photo).  Our guide got breathless describing the ancient drainage systems discovered there.

Two things that haven’t  been found are 1) gold in any significant quantity, and 2) human remains.  This suggests to scientists that there was a relatively orderly evacuation of Akrotiri prior to the eruption.  The hypothesis is that a series of earthquakes preceded the main event by several months, convincing the residents that it was time to pack up their valuables and get out.  In other words, Akrotiri had been abandoned before it got buried.

Maybe so.  And maybe the fleeing Minoans got just far enough away to be caught in the tsunami waves generated by an explosion estimated to be the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs.

In any case, the only documented fatality at Akrotiri occurred in 2005.  There is a roof over the archaeological site (see photo again); a portion of it collapsed, killing a British tourist and injuring several others. 

Because of that incident, the site has been closed to visitors, although there is talk that it will reopen “soon”.  As you may have read, however, there is virtually no gold to be found in Greece’s treasury either, so they may keep saying “soon” for a very long time.