Total eclipse of the Moon

"This is a very rare event. It only happens every 400 years," said the glossy lady on ITV this morning. "Oh, dear," I said - or maybe something worse. "Text them!" said my wife. But I had to press on with the day so I hope somebody else commented.

Lunar eclipses are visible somewhere on Earth most years. Statistically that means we can see one in Britain on average once every year or two. Sometimes we'll see them in successive years and sometimes we might have to wait two or three years. In 2011 we'll be able to see lunar eclipses on 15 June and 10 December, but then we'll have to wait until 2015.

So, what's this "every 400 years" about? Well, it is apparently more than 400 years since the last time a total eclipse coincided with the winter solstice. This is a coincidence of so little import that nobody has yet bothered to work out when it will happen next but it certainly isn't a recurring event every 400 years. It is equally valid to get excited because a lunar eclipse falls on your birthday, on the birthday of Sun Myung Moon, or on a day when American Werewolf in London is being shown on TCM. But I'm not sure that poor Kate Garraway appreciated any of this and somebody glancing only briefly at that channel - like myself - could easily have come away with the impression that lunar eclipses in general were extremely rare events. I'm really not sure if this was her own impression.

I shouldn't complain; it's great to see a celestial event receiving this much attention. But it's hard not to feel uneasy at some of what gets said on these occasions, and the degree of cosmic ignorance that gets revealed.

Anyway, regardless of which day it falls on, a lunar eclipse is a beautiful and only slightly unusual sight and you won't have to wait 400 years to see the next one.

Why are we still here?

I guess there are several people who'd like answers to that question, each with his or her own view of why we shouldn't still be here. What a lot of fun I could have! But I had something less destructive in mind.

When you think about it, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned: the idea of people sitting in a room listening to another person speak, even with multimedia accompaniment, or talking to one another. What's wrong with them? Don't they have internet in their houses? Surely that's enough, whether they want to know about the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Laplace's Equation, the Killing Times or medieval tapestry. More and more scholarly articles are widely available for those who want to delve deeper. Why come to a class? - you can just teach yourself.

Of course there are a lot of obvious answers. I hope anybody who reads this and is interested will add some of them as comments - just a word or two will be fine, guys! But I'm also wondering, not for the first time, how we can use the new opportunities these media present, what useful revisions of practice they offer us. We need to keep thinking about this because the technologies keep changing.

I was grappling with this topic two or three posts ago and I deferred to Aimee Mann; now I think it's either write a book or tackle it a tiny bit at a time, with no idea of where we'll wind up. And I guess that's what a blog is for. So, first of what may become an extended sequence. Give us your thoughts!