Located prominently in the middle of the UWA website's frontpage is a 'news and events' box that describes what's on in school. I've never known that actually serves much of a purpose...

Until today, that is. The frontpage screamed out a note that there's going to be a 1pm talk on clouds at the art gallery located a hundred metres from the last 'abnormal' lecture theatre at 2pm. This is to accompany the ongoing exhibit on clouds. I was floored. Is it befitting for a serious art gallery to have such fluffy programs? Passing this art gallery for 3 years now on the way to the bus stop without going in once, this was as good a time as any.

From the romantic perspective, clouds are the intermediary between heaven and earth. Moses and his complaining group were led for 40 years in the desert by a pillar of cloud. In today's terms, it's probably a cumulonimbus; still, that was no ordinary cumulonimbus. It was divine. The Creator was personally involved with this one.

I think clouds are the only things in nature that performs for people on a grand scale. Sure, other aspects of the natural word do that to a certain extent; birds fly in V-formation, Old Faithful geysers erupting every 2 minutes, whales doing their thing beside the tourist boat...

But the performance of clouds is different. It's a canvas that stretches from one end of the earth to the other, it's one of the few things that is wider than the visual field of the human eye.

And on this canvas comes the most textured of all paintings. You can have soft clouds, hard clouds, grey clouds, cotton clouds, rainy stratus, isolated cumulus, whispering altocumulus, fire stratocumulus, mushroom cumulonimbus...

And the artist has lots of things to work with; humidity, light colour, dust density and so on. It's also a different performance at different times of the day, and some would say the final act is the sunset. Why is the interplay between the evening light, the sun, and clouds so enchanting? The answer is obvious; it's in our genes. I'm pretty sure in a century or so, someone will find a 'clouds' gene to explain the awe one has for sunsets and related phenomena. In the meantime, I'll try to get past the genetic basis of autism for the exam first...