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This is a fascinating thread. You guys are awesome. Love the fact that many of you live outside the US. Every day here is a learning experience, and not just LV. I didn't know "The Iron Lady" (Thatcher) was a chemist. My brother is a chemical engineer - and he would do about as well as I would in politics. As controversial as Maggie was/is, I for one have always loved her. She and Reagan. A political marriage from heaven. Maggie had more 'nads than 99.9% of the politicians we have now in this country (USA).

Comedians and wrestlers also work out great (and I'm not even mentioning Reagan, Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood). Here's an interesting tidbit I forgot to mention - originally, the job was offered to Albert Einstein (and you really can't get much more scientific than that), but he turned it down.

Here are a few more: Benjamin Franklin Chaim Weizmann - Israel's first president and a proper chemist Ephraim Katzir - Israel's fourth president - a biophysicist Yuval Neeman (no relation to me) - physicist (one of the discoverers of Hadrons) and science minister. Daniel Hershkovitz - A mathematician (he was the dean of the math department in the Israeli eqivalent of MIT) and the current science minister.

And there's no CTRL-Z in politics.

I can't speak for other engineers, but there's one main reason I would never go into politics. The issues are too big for my comfort level. The scope of the problems politicians try to solve are much, much larger and have far more unknowns than the problems I solve as an engineer. As an engineer I always have to deal with compromises and unknowns, but I can usually get the information I need to get a feel for what those unknowns are and make an informed decision. Decisions politicians make have so many far reaching consequences there's simply no way to get a handle on the unknowns. Even the "known" consequences often hotly debated with no clear answer. Politicians either have to delude themselves into believing they fully understand the tradeoffs or they must admit they are making an uninformed decision. Thanks, but I'll pass. Regarding Margaret Thatcher, I was watching a television show about the British SAS and the hostage rescue training they do in their kill house. Sometimes political dignitaries would come observe training exercises. Apparently Thatcher insisted on playing the role of the hostage during one exercise (note they train with live ammo) and sat in a chair with several targets around her. The SAS broke into the room and amidst a barrage gunfire and noise eliminated all the targets. When the few seconds of chaos were over, Thatcher was still sitting in her chair looking very dignified while her aide cowered on the floor. She looked at him and said, "Get off the floor <name>, you're embarrassing me." Iron Lady indeed.

This thread on the dark-side http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=245990#M245990 is a very in-depth discusion of the event structure and who gets waht when and under what conditions. It is not lite reading but it digs into every hole we could think of. Ben

There are some examples in UK politics. The (in)famous Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher read chemistry at Oxford, and was a research chemist for a plastics company. TheLabour party politician, Margaret Beckett was a metallurgist who worked as an researcher at Manchester University in the late 1960's. The now departed (in disgrace) MP Ian Gibson was a lecturer in Biology at the University of East Anglia in the UK. There are others I'm sure, but those are the three that came to mind first.