So, Is Engineering for you?

Did you know that Osama bin Laden has (sorry had) a degree in civil engineering? Not from the DIT i have to add. But it might be worth mentioning at Bolton St. open days. It's actually quite interesting to note the significant number of rather odd, charasmatic leaders who do have engineering backgrounds. Boris Yelsin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (current president in Iran), Hu Jintao - (current president of China) and 9 members of his politburo. It was (sorry is) an area of research interest to one of our senior academics in the college and we found this really interesting (extremely-readable) article, in the Economist last summer, about career paths of politicians: There was a lawyer, an engineer and a politician... It's an interseting hypothesis - that the types of people in charge is often influenced by a countrys current ideology and recent history. In democracies lawyers dominate. In capitalist states its unsually businessmen. In countries expanding their industrial base, concentrating spending on infrastructure, often you'll find engineers, - those who ensure things work. So that could explain the predominance of engineers in the current Chinese set up. And then consider America. While both Lincoln and Washington were engineers by profession, the last US President trained engineer was Herbert Hoover (who the dam was named after) in 1933.
How did we get from Bin Laden to the Hoover Dam?