One of the things that people overlook about the Kennedys is how Irish their political machines were. They (and other Irish-American politicos like the Daleys in Chicago) had a mastery of hyperlocal politics that’s quintessentially Irish. Charley Haughey or Bertie Ahern would have recognised Ted Kennedy’s hold on his Massachussetts constituency. In 1968, when the news broke that the Boston consulting firm Bolt Beranek & Newman had been awarded the contract to build the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) which were the ARPANET’s routers, the engineers were surprised to receive a telegram from their local Senator congratulating them on winning the contract to build the “Interfaith Message Processor”.

To anyone raised in rural Ireland, this attention to local detail seems totally familiar. My father — who was a totally non-political person and did not mix with politicians of any stripe — died many years ago in a Cork hospital at 7.15am on a Sunday morning. At 8am, a telegram expressing condolences arrived at our family home. It was from Jack Lynch, who was then the Irish Prime Minister — but also happened to be our local TD (i.e. member of Parliament).

LATER: There’s a good piece in the Guardian by Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote a novel based on the Chappaquiddick incident. Excerpt:

‘There are no second acts in American lives’– this dour pronouncement of F Scott Fitzgerald has been many times refuted, and at no time more appropriately than in reference to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose death was announced yesterday. Indeed, it might be argued that Senator Kennedy’s career as one of the most influential of 20th-century Democratic politicians, an iconic figure as powerful, and as morally enigmatic, as President Bill Clinton, whom in many ways Kennedy resembled, was a consequence of his notorious behaviour at Chappaquiddick bridge in July 1969.

Yet, ironically, following this nadir in his life/ career, Ted Kennedy seemed to have genuinely refashioned himself as a serious, idealistic, tirelessly energetic liberal Democrat in the mold of 1960s/1970s American liberalism, arguably the greatest Democratic senator of the 20th century. His tireless advocacy of civil rights, rights for disabled Americans, health care, voting reform, his courageous vote against the Iraq war (when numerous Democrats including Hillary Clinton voted for it) suggest that there are not only “second acts” in American lives, but that the Renaissance concept of the “fortunate fall” may be relevant here: one “falls” as Adam and Eve “fell”; one sins and repents and is forgiven, provided that one remakes one’s life…

STILL LATER: There’s a fine obit in the Economist which concludes:

Yet even when he was carousing—and he sobered up in the 1990s—he was a hell of a senator. He was not a details man; he had a devoted staff for that. But he had passion and energy and a palpable desire to comfort the afflicted. From the moment he entered the Senate, he agitated for civil rights for blacks. His beefy fingerprints are on the Voting Rights Act, the Age Discrimination Act and the Freedom of Information Act. He pushed for an end to the war in Vietnam, for stricter safety rules at work and for sanctions against apartheid South Africa. He sometimes took bold stances while his party dithered: he opposed George Bush junior’s Iraq war from the start. Yet he worked hand-in-glove with Mr Bush to make schools more accountable and to liberalise immigration law, though the latter task defeated them both.

His last quest was to make health insurance universal. He first attempted this in the 1970s. This year he threw all his weight behind Barack Obama’s health plan, before cancer made him too ill to work. Last week, suspecting that the end was near, he urged a change in Massachusetts law to allow a temporary successor to be appointed by the Democratic governor. If this does not happen, the seat could be empty for months, depriving Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate—and reminding Americans how big a man, in every sense, they have lost.

There’s a nice piece in this week’s Economist about the menace of feature creep.

Look at what has happened to netbooks — those once-minimalist laptop computers for doing basic online chores while on the hoof. Though palmtop computers and sub-notebooks had been around for decades, a Taiwanese firm called Asus introduced the world to netbooks in 2007 with its ground-breaking Eee PC. The two-pound device had a seven-inch screen, no optical drive or hard drive, and occupied half the space of a typical notebook computer of the day. It had all the essentials (and no unnecessary extras) for doing the job, and could be slipped into a briefcase, handbag or raincoat pocket and hardly noticed.

Seeing a good thing, rival makers rushed in with me-too versions—each purporting to offer improvements. The original keyboard was only 85% as wide as a full-sized one. Many people thought that just fine, especially as it offered the luxury of a seven-inch screen. For the past 20 years, your itinerant correspondent has cheerfully used palmtops with 62% keyboards and six-inch screens to check his e-mail, surf the web and file stories from odd places. The me-toos, nevertheless, deemed 85% unusable and increased it to 92%.

With the increase in keyboard width came an increase in the netbook’s screen size, room for a fairly hefty hard-drive, additional ports, a bigger battery—and yet more weight. Today’s netbooks are now the size of low-end laptops, with up to 12-inch screens, 160 gigabyte drives, one or two gigabytes of random-access memory, a video camera, and cellular as well as wireless transceivers. As a result, they now weigh well over three pounds and need a padded case to lug them around. The original concept has been lost in a blizzard of feature-creep.

Spot on. I’ve tried a lot of these NetBooks and still haven’t found anything that beats the original ASUS. The worst culprit, in a way, is the HP MiniNote which is beautifully over-engineered and has a lovely screen but is too heavy and bulky to carry round.

Interesting new angle on the Is-Google-Making-Us-Stupid meme.

Berridge has proposed that in some addictions the brain becomes sensitized to the wanting cycle of a particular reward. So addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained. “The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it,” Berridge explains. “And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants wedd be better off without.” So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. “As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite,” he explains.

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a ‘CrackBerry.’

The system is also activated by particular types of cues that a reward is coming. In order to have the maximum effect, the cues should be small, discrete, specific—like the bell Pavlov rang for his dogs. Panksepp says a way to drive animals into a frenzy is to give them only tiny bits of food: This simultaneously stimulating and unsatisfying tease sends the seeking system into hyperactivity. Berridge says the “ding” announcing a new e-mail or the vibration that signals the arrival of a text message serves as a reward cue for us.

And how about this?

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem.

Hmmm…