[BLOG] Some Friday links

• 80 Beats links to a profile of Taiwanese computer programmer Kevin Wang, the man whose humourous animations of news events have created for him a worldwide fandom.
• At Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster discusses the implications of theories of planetary formation suggesting that the number of free-floating planets far exceeds the number of star-orbiting planets (or stars, even) for interstellar migration: island-hopping in the Oort to the next star over?
• Crooked Timber’s Rich Yeselton discusses Mitt Romney’s alternating use of “Democratic” and the insulting diminuitive “Democrat” on the campaign trail. At the very least, Romney may not be a man without qualities, but those qualities are invisible.
• Eastern Approaches links to two blog posts on ethnic tensions with international implications in the Baltic States, one on a polarizing referendum in Latvia on granting the Russian language official status, the other on a Polish-Lithuanian dispute over the Lithuanization of Polish names.
• Geocurrents has a post outlining the long history of Russian/Russophone immigration to the San Francisco Bay area.
• At Registan, Wendell Schwab discusses the patronage in Kazakhstan of religious art and places of worship by politicians, apparently a controversial bypassing of the state.
• Slap Upside the Head is rightly unimpressed with the Ontario public Roman Catholic school system’s substitute for gay-straight alliances in its schools.
• At Spacing Toronto, Noah van der Laan discusses the world’s largest streetcar network in Australia’s second city of Melbourne. Lessons there!.
• Finally, in the aftermath of Whitney Houston’s death Torontoist gathered and shared vintage news articles about Houston’s presence in Toronto. The reviews were very good, although one reviewer’s excitement at imagining what her voice would be like in two decades (after her mid-1980s appearance) is inevitably sad.