Model airplanes and more, for the masses

Watching DVB's TV program on radio-controlled model planes a few days back, I have this nostalgia for my high school days when I frequently did my round of window shopping at one particular shop on the east side of the then Latta (now Latha) street in downtown Yangon. So far as I could remember, it was the only place where they display a miniature diesel engine for a model airplane for sale at that time. I remember it as a sleek 0.5 cc engine and the price was a bit over 40 kyats. Those days, it was indeed a steep price for a school boy from a home which was struggling to make ends meet. The brand of the engine I remember was “Frog”--yes, that's right, I just confirmed it from the Web!

Those days too, I wasn't able to afford to buy even a kit of model airplane made of Balsa wood with its propeller powered by a rubber band. Yet I could save enough to buy a solid model kit of the famous American Jet fighter Sabre, cut and shaped it, assembled, painted, and polished it and manged to win a second price at an aeromodel competition. No wonder, of my many ambitions one was to be an aircraft designer and again like most of my ambitions this also had to be dropped after I completed high school.

Like in the old times my heart still throbs as I watched radio-controlled model planes fly in the DVB program. But the fact is that you not only need to have a stylish model plane that could fly, but you also need good radio-control equipment that alone would cost you something like five to eight hundred thousand kyats. Moreover you'll need a car to take you and your equipment to a big enough free space to fly and which also comes with some piece of paved road to use as a runway. No wonder it is an exclusive rich boys' club about twenty strong, though I spotted one gentleman in his forties or fifties who is also a drone enthusiast.

I looked up about them on the Web and found Myanmar RC Builders & Flyers Club here from where these pictures were taken.

It's good. But what about those pitiful admirers including the ko-yins in saffron robes? Well, here's what they could do.

That was from instructions for making Foam Plate and Plastic Straw Gliders available here.

There is a lot of webpages available for how to make foam plate gliders, but a lot of them ask you to use an electric glue gun and when I looked for the price at a supermarket I found that it would cost a bit over 5000 kyats and a piece of glue stick about 14 inches long will cost you 200 kyats. However, the above source gives instructions on making foam plate gliders using tape for gluing, so that is the one you may prefer.

Well, that is not the end of my story. It is always good to have high enough ambitions I suppose, especially for ordinary folks. So I'll pretend that the straw and foam gliders and paper gliders are nearer to micro air vehicles (that is a biiiiiig leap of faith, but decide for yourselves) than the radio-controlled model airplanes which are nearer to real airplanes at our service and so that's nothing new.

How about this:

“With no motor and only about 10 parts, the Cicada resembles a paper airplane with a circuit board”. See what I mean!

While different nations have been doing all-out MAV research, the Black Hornet MAV first used by UK troops in Afghanistan in 2012 is yet to be beaten. It has been described as the spy plane that fits in the palm of your hand.

However it doesn't come cheap; the price is 20m pounds for just 160 units! But it is said to be considerably more advanced than anything that would be found on a remote-controlled aircraft; the motors, servos and sensors are smaller and more efficient; the radio-link is more advanced, the system has fully integrated GPS, as well an autopilot system, and is far more robust.

“Developed by Norwegian firm Prox Dynamics — which began life developing devices for the remote-control plane market — the tiny vehicle weighs just 15g and measures around 10 by 2.5cm. … Launched by hand and controlled via a tablet, the device is equipped with a tiny video camera and video downlink that it uses to relay real-time footage to its operators.”

But the most interesting research currently is the development of flapping-wing vehicles that mimic bird and insect flight. It is commonly believed that micro fixed wing airplanes and helicopters outperform MAVs at the size of birds, but become inferior to flapping MAVs at the size of insects. As for the flying insects they have refined their flight over 300 million years of evolution so their method is exceptionally power efficient, silent and allow them to be incredibly agile. By mimicking them researchers hope to create a new generation of tiny air vehicles capable of operating in confined spaces and inside buildings.

As for me, one of these days I am going to show you my paper glider that kept me thrilled (for a modest few seconds to be frank, because that's the limit of their flying time) and you only need some smooth and rigid enough paper, a scissor, and some cooked rice soft enough to use as paste. But I can't promise. So it will be better to start your own project right now, and … happy flying!

And don't be selfish. Let the kids have your glider and better still, share your design secrets.

Beyond all reason

I was in our local dama-yon, the community hall for Buddhists this afternoon, the fourth day of our water festival. This place has been our polling station for the landmark general elections of last November. On the same gray board that carried the name of the candidates for the election, I saw two calendars. The wind has changed. I see it flutters the leaves of time. You'll need to tear off the old ones to keep up with the present so as to be ready for the future.

I haven't seen Padauk, the seasonal flower of the water festival yet. They mark the transition from old to the new Myanmar year and Padauk should be here any time soon I guess.

We all are hoping to welcome a Myanmar new year full of peace and promise. Yet for the present, we may soon see problems on the table that threatened to suffocate and swallow us bit by bit like a constrictor. Some, like the Myitsone Dam problem would not leave us alone until it has been resolved one way or another.

It is perfectly legitimate for you or me or anyone to say YES or NO to the Myitsone Dam. But it has to come from the bottom of your heart and with a clear conscience. Clearly it is our birthright to have a say. Then allow me to refuse to listen to any arguments for or against the Dam because I won't be able to understand them anyway, or else choose not to understand and that won't make a difference for me. With a problem of such scale, no analysis would be broad enough or deep enough to best serve the peoples of our land or our future generations. In such a situation, all the fine analysis, faultless arguments, and intricate logic won't do. For, what is more justifiable than the genuine will of the people?

Beyond all reason has been a phrase meaning idiocy that is unthinkable and it would have been used here and abroad for condemning “such blind denial in the name of will of the people”. I take that differently. In fact, the will of people is over and above all reason because no amount of reasoning will be good enough to resolve a problem big enough to be resolvable only by people's genuine will.

Anyway, let each of us exercise this right by ourselves and then let me point out that the burden of proof against the primacy of people's will rests on those who disagree. And now, Myitsone is in distress. Because we are fed and sheltered by this land, these waters, and this sky, shouldn't we be sensitive to their woes? If we can't express our gratitude decently and repay this debt in our life time shouldn't we let our children and their children and their children do it in their times and beyond? Shouldn't we better leave the hardest part to the future generations with their better knowledge and more advanced technologies and in doing so reserve finer rewards when, where, and for whom these are rightly due?

Nevertheless beware of this dirty device: When reason fails, the Devil helps. That means “When all the usual, sensible, known methods or procedures fail to get you out of a jam; you take whatever measures needed to force a solution”. We need to be constantly on the alert for such foul play and endure!

Myanmar Trivia

In Ya-da-na-bon, the academy award wining Myanmar movie, one of my favorite scenes was when the heroine’s young nephew asked the hero's name and U Tun Myat the advocate answered the child: “Uncle's name is Maung Tun Myat”.

Quite a while ago, I was surprised and annoyed when a younger coworker I've known for years called me up by phone and says: “Are you ahkogyi? I am U Doe!” (အကိုကြီးလား။ကျွန်တော် ဦးဒိုးပါ။). In our language the pronoun “I” has a number of variants depending on the occasion and on who you are, and your gender. For males ကျွန်တော် which literally means “a king's subject” could be used to refer to yourself in addressing a superior, or used among the equals as a humble gesture. On the other hand, the prefix to a name U (ဦး) is used for addressing a male considerably older than yourself or a male of respectable social status or with some official position. We have similar usages for the females also and that's how we grew up with our Myanmar language.

So I may be excused for being annoyed when I hear this combination of “I” and “U”. So irritating to my ears (နားကလောပါတယ်). I think the correct way should be to use “Are you ahkogyi? I am Maung Doe!” (အကိုကြီးလား။ကျွန်တော် မောင်ဒိုးပါ။). Here ahkogyi means “big brother”. And here's some references:

Well, in real life we keep on hearing this combination of “I” and “U” regularly at least for the last five years and still today when I tuned in my favorite channels on radio or TV. It has been virtually institutionalized!

If I am not mistaken, the fact was that I wasn't aware of such misuse of Myanmar language throughout my career as a government employee until I left it in the early nineteen-nineties. When has this “official” culture of self-esteem (over)developed? It's so much unlike our humble and polite manners.

I wish I could show you the movie clip of U Tun Myat the advocate telling his name to the child!

Myanmar Land tidbits: The Making of the Land and Revenue Act, 1876

In “Housing, Land And Property Rights In Burma: The Current Legal Framework”, a compilation over twelve-hundred pages long and published in 2009 by the Displacement Solutions and The HLP Institute we are presented with a most comprehensive collection of HLP laws. Thanks to the generosity of the publishers anyone could get the entire book (Burma_HLP_book.pdf) in digital form here.

The Land and Revenue Act (India Act II, 1876) was the first major land law enacted on our land after the annexation of “Lower Burma”. Page 22 of the HLP_book says:

Through the adoption of progressive land and revenue laws the British created, for the first time, a legal arrangement recognising private ownership of land as well as a system of land revenue tax collection. Due to the separate annexation of Lower and Upper Burma42 separate legislation was passed to suit these different jurisdictions. The Land and Revenue Act (1879) was the first major land law enacted in Burma and governed the acquisition of land rights for private persons as well as the procedures for assessment and collection of land revenue taxes. Following this legislation, the Upper Burma Land and Revenue Regulation (1889) was adopted and applied similar principles of land ownership and land revenue tax collection.

But when I started reading the this Act on page-54, I didn't feel comfortable as reading its text in the “Lower Burma Land Revenue Manual” or other old law books that were standard references for us and other Government Agencies. Why would the opening sentence of this law on page-54 says “ … rights in land in the Union of Burma” or in paragraph-2 of part I of the act says “... The President of the Union may ...” while the title says “THE LAND AND REVENUE ACT; India Act II, 1876; 1 February 1879” without mentioning any amendments. May be it is their style and that was the flavor throughout this compilation.

On the lighter side, I would joke that this is reminiscent of the heydays of the press scrutiny office. We Myanmars have a way of writing one way and reading it another way and this reminds me of possibly being the handiwork of former press scrutiny people. Once I read a magazine article by our late Thu-Maung, a successful actor, singer, and writer. By chance my eyes were drawn to a phrase containing the words “myeik-kyar” (မြိတ်ကြား). Through its context, it clearly should be “phate-kyar” (ဖိတ်ကြား) as we write and pronounce, meaning “invite”. I was completely baffled. But then I realized that Thu-Maung must have spelled “beik-kyar” (ဘိတ်ကြား) as written sometimes, which would have been corrected by someone as “myeik-kyar” (မြိတ်ကြား) because Beik a city in Tanintharyi Division is written Myeik (မြိတ်)! Lest I angered the traditionally sensitive groups, I would need to add that the magazine editor or even the typist may have, in fact, been responsible for this slip.

To continue with my story, I have been fascinated like others in the real meaning and intention behind the laws. The language of the laws doesn't help the laymen much. But if you have behind the scene access like sitting through the parliamentary debates that would be really helpful. So when I chanced to read the debates that led to the Land and Revenue Act, 1876, despite my meager knowledge of law in general and Myanmar land laws in particular, it struck me as something close to a missing link for Myanmar Land Laws.

The debate I am mentioning was recounted in full in chapter-VIII (pages 85-154) of the “Burma Settlement Manual, Volume-I” by T C Wilson, The Commissioner of Settlements and Land Records. It was printed at the British Burma Press in Rangoon in 1908. Though I don't have enough knowledge to claim that the whole work is relatively unknown, I can say definitely that my fellow junior officers didn't know about it at all. As for my close seniors, I doubt if they were any better.

My first encounter with this work, I guess, was in the mid-eighties at the headquarters of the Settlements and Land Records Department in Yangon. Of the fond memories of those days, I remembered my seniors regarding me a hard-headed youngster (relatively) and an upstart of some sort, nevertheless tolerating my (relatively) radical ideas and leaving me alone to browse the contents of such old books, for example.

Well, as it happened, I was really impressed with this work, which I vaguely remembered as having picked it up either from our dusty library or from the Lower Burma Settlements Office. I introduced it to one of my seniors at our headquarter with much enthusiasm. Afterward there was no communication between us about this book so far as I can remember. Much later, after I've left my job, I asked my friends about this book and came to know that the book had been given away by my senior officer to someone at the BSPP (Burmese Socialist Programme Party) headquarter and it was the last thing I heard about it.

Fortunately, I few months ago I happened to mention this book to one of my younger retirees from the same government agency I had worked for. Then my friend recalled picking up some old books many years ago from a friend of his who was packing up to move his office to the new headquarters. Checking this collection out, my friend miraculously recovered another copy of the Settlement Manual by Mr. Wilson.

The following shows the scanned first and last pages of chapter-VIII of the book.

It seems too precious to keep contents of the book between my friend and myself, so for a start I've shared the entire chapter-VIII here in three parts:

TCW_LRA1876_pp85-107.pdf - available here

TCW_LRA1876_pp108-131.pdf - available here

TCW_LRA1876_pp132-154.pdf - available here

As if people mattered

When someone talks about governance with metta, I felt a bit uneasy. Jealous perhaps—why should cronies for example get metta as a bonus when they took everything and got everything? But, I guess, a share of metta is unlike a share of the pie. Here everyone gets the whole of it and it will be something like the realization of win-win and level playing field dreams.

Before being rudely awakened from the day dream like the young glass-ware hawker of “building a brick house in the air” when he has just kicked his basket in his sleep and broken all his glass, I felt I should look for and try to understand some venture a bit modest. In no way it's a rejection of the metta idea, or was I taken somewhat aback by the lofty implications—rather, an inspiration to think about some humble building blocks for it.

Project-gurus warned us of the folly of setting up our objectives as the negation of current undesirable conditions. Yet that is exactly what we may like to do in this situation. First, just heap everyone or every groups we would like to deny—cronies and others and get their negation—the people. Then do everything “... as if people mattered”.

Obviously that is not so easy! Yet people has been thinking along this line for considerable time in the past. Personally this phrase has been laying dormant in my heart for a long time … . And yet I've never bothered to look up on it!

I don't know if it fits, but now I am hearing these lines from a Pulitzer winning poet:

Bad penny pendulum

You kept my constant time

To bob in blue July

Where gold finches fly

Over the glittering fecund reach of our growing land

Once more now, this second

I hold you in my hands

Well, you would have guessed that you in my mind's eye is no other than “as if people mattered”.

As last minute check I did look up that phrase on the web and the first result from Google gave all 10 entries on Shumacher's “Small is Beautiful” except the one on “Teaching Economics As If People Mattered”. What a surprise! I have completely forgotten that Sumacher's book carry the sub-heading “Economic as if People Mattered”!

The beauty of search engines is that they return short descriptions relating to what you are looking for and most of the time they are relevant and quite illuminating even for someone completely new to the subject. The second page of results for my search on “as if people mattered” gives:

• TechnoScience as if People Mattered
• Small is Beautiful
• Housing as if People Mattered
• Programming as if People Mattered
• Global Politics as if People Mattered
• Smart is Beautiful: low carbon cities as if people mattered
• Distributism: Economics as if People Mattered
• Law Reform as if People Mattered

To me it seems all of them could be useful to us now, some of them more urgent than others. Indeed, as we have so much to work on to straighten our society and our endowments, it would not be an exaggeration to think that everything you find with aiming for “... as if people mattered” will be desirable and applicable, may be with some prioritization thrown in.

The third page of results carries:

• Letters: Alternative economics – as if people mattered
• Economic Development as if People Mattered

Here, the entry on the description of the first bullet Political economy can be thought of, in EF Schumacher's phrase, as "economics as if people mattered" that appeared in the Guardian caught my eye. Well, the first and last thing I'd read about political economy was one on Burma by Furnival a long time ago and now completely forgotten. Until now it was a mystery to me why my Myanmar friend in Down Under has changed his specialization from agricultural economics to political economy. Now I can see his reason: he must have taken the vow afresh to practice economics as if people mattered! Please allow my respect and admiration for you, my friend.

And if you go on with your search results you are sure to find something that you are specifically interested in, such as these and more from about three million results Google could find.

• Writing about art as if people mattered
• Urban planning as if people mattered
• Housing as if people mattered
• Economic History as if People Mattered
• Capitalism: An economy as if people mattered
• Green Building Design as if People Mattered
• Employment Law as if People Mattered
• Social Business: Business as if People Mattered

The following result appeared on page-6 and it is of special significance to me because I have a friend running a local research unit who is obsessed with making government budgets fit people's needs:

• Budgets as if People Mattered.

Well, my findings here are surely amateurish and could even be dismissed as nothing more than sneers at the politicians, professionals, bureaucrats, cronies and others. At the same time adversaries to “as if people mattered” may already have antidotes and tricks up their sleeves. Beware.

Well, to my dumb fellows I say: you are (close to being) delivered; go and multiply!

Dummy meets JSON – II

Before I tried out my dumb approach shown in my last post, I guess I had the workable idea to flatten the second column whose name is “apis” and which is a list of 102 data frames each with two variables, namely, “name” and “url”, with variable number of rows.

To do so, I need to find way to convert the list of 102 data frames into a single data frame and then combine this with the first column of the original data frame. For that I found this work perfectly:

This single data frame consisted of 421 rows and to combine with x$name which has 102 rows, I could create an id column in the collapsed data frame and using row.names of x as integer I could then merge the two data frames. Then I could extract the appropriate columns of the merged data frame to write to a csv file. The problem was that I didn't know how to add id to the collapsed data frame. That's why I resorted to my dumb approach given in my last post.

Now I found that I could add id to the list of data frames x$apis (or x[[2]]) with:

That let me get a not-so-dumb solution as follows:

But wait, the R gurus would like to see something more elegant than this. Instead of the “for” loop in line number 9 of my script, they would like to see something that is not using a loop. Well, it is beyond my reach right now.

Dummy meets JSON - I

It must have been a not-so-intelligent autodidact's typical approach to something new for him.

There's this website posting some data in JSON format. I stumbled upon it. More accurately it was a series of stumbling. I tried to find out more about open data on the web; stumbled upon APIs (application programming interface); couldn't understand much; looked for examples; found more about JSON; stumbled upon Data.gov website; looked for ways to access data in JSON format; found and installed jasonlite an R package; found some example scripts for accessing JSON with jasonlite; got a couple of successes with simple JSON data like the one on biodiversity of New York State demonstrated in my last post.

Well, that wasn't the end of my story. From the API Resources for Federal Agencies available here, I downloaded the individual_apis.json file. The following is a part of the file opened by notepad and you can read and understand everything written there.

With the following code I could access the JASON file from R.

The code head(x) gives the first six rows of x;

Moving the slider in the scroll bar to the right shows the remaining part.

All this seems fine. So I tried to write the whole of “x” to a comma separated value (csv) text file.

# write csv file

write.csv(x, file = "individual_apis.csv", row.names = FALSE)

It couldn't be done. The error message was:

Error in .External2(C_writetable, x, file, nrow(x), p, rnames, sep, eol, :

unimplemented type 'list' in 'EncodeElement'

I tried looking for possible solution on the web and tried out many that seemed promising. But failed miserably. Finally I found a post by Mark Needham (R: write.csv – unimplemented type ‘list’ in ‘EncodeElement’) that showed the remedy for a problem with the error message that exactly matches mine. He advised that:

“If we do have a list that we want to add to the data frame we need to convert it to a vector first so we don’t run into this type of problem”

In our case, as well as his, the data frame consisted of two columns and the second column happened to be a list instead of a vector. The difference between his data frame and mine was that his second column consisted of data elements when converted to a vector has the same number of elements as the first column, whereas my second column consisted of a list of data frames each with two columns and variable number of rows. And I don't have enough knowledge of R to be able to adapt his method to my more complex situation.

Then as my second and third screenshots above showed, the whole of my data frame could be displayed on the screen properly. So in a typical dummy way I realized that if I could transfer that output to a text file it would be the solution. The only way I know of for that is to use the “sink” function and after some struggle I succeeded. My script runs:

Then the saved text file is read in two parts, cleaned, combined into one data frame, and csv file written and is done (credit due to f3lix for the answer to How to trim leading and trailing whitespace in R? on Stack Overflow).

.

However, I couldn't be triumphant for long because when I compared contents of the csv file with the output on the console I found at once a discrepancy. The console displayed for the 8^th row:

Cropland Data Layer, Quick Stats API, http://www.nass.usda.gov/research/Cropland/sarsfaqs2.html#_Cropscape1.2, http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/api

while individual_apis.csv gives:

Cropland Data Layer, Quick Stats API, http://www.nass.usda.gov/research/Cropland/sarsfaqs2.html.

So it missed “#_Cropscape1.2, http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/api” and I couldn't get that right. Besides there could be lot more misses or some other errors which means I'll have to look for a better way.