Benjamin Geer

‘Scripting languages are designed for gluing’, wrote John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl, in 1998.1 What Ousterhout had in mind was writing an application in a scripting language and having it delegate certain functions to components written in system pro…

Overview # This post is a brief illustration of some database optimisation techniques, using the BRÉF (Base Révisée des Élu·es de France / Revised database of representatives elected in France), which contains data about representatives elected in France…

I wrote a little Rust program, sqlstopwatch, to compare the performance of different SQL queries.

Overview # To continue learning Rust, I decided to implement a client for Bittorrent, the communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing.

[English version of the text published in Spanish.1] Mona Salem Said Ja‘bub, قيادة المجتمع نحو التغيير: التجربة التربوية لثورة ظفار (1969-1992) [Leading Society towards Change: The Educational Experience of the Dhofar Revolution (1969-1992)], Beirut: مركز…

Overview # To help me learn Rust, I decided to implement an interpreter for Lox, the scripting language in Robert Nystrom’s book Crafting Interpreters.

I thought it would be interesting to try some basic network analysis of the Paris métro (rapid transit) and RER (commuter rail) systems, starting with some centrality indices.

While reading Khaled Khalifa’s beautiful, elegiac novel No One Prayed Over Their Graves, I noticed something that may not matter in the context of the novel, but is worth thinking about if you’re interested in the history of social categories that are tak…

In 2024 I did the English subtitles for the short film Mal partum (English title: The Sound of Crying), a beautiful documentary about postnatal depression.

The novel On the Greenwich Line, by the Egyptian writer Shady Lewis, came out in 2019.

[English version of the text published in Spanish.1] Sherif Younis, الزحف المقدس: مظاهرات التنحي وتشكل عبادة ناصر [The Sacred March: The Demonstrations Against Nasser’s Resignation and the Formation of His Cult], 1st edition, Cairo, Dar Mirit, 2005. 2nd r…

Here’s one way to write Arabic articles in Markdown format and typeset them as PDF files.

An Arabic-language podcast that I started in 2021 on ecology, migration, and inequality, and would like to continue someday: كوكبنا.شبكة.

In 2020 I started a project called Tondauer, to make Creative Commons licensed editions of sheet music.

My old blog (2013-2021) on the sociology of autonomy and the autonomy of sociology.

My old Arabic blog (2009-2014) on which I summarised research that I thought was interesting: أبحاث لفتت نظري.

I’m a software developer and ex-academic (sociology, conceptual history, cognitive linguistics, Arabic culture, digital humanities).

In 1841, Fanny Hensel (1805–1847) wrote Das Jahr (The Year), a large-scale piano cycle with a movement for each month of the year.

Frédéric Chopin, Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2.

J.

I started playing jazz guitar around the time I went to university.