hallettj

They can flash by pressing the button. On some flashlights partially pressing and releasing the button flashes the light off and on. That’s a notable difference from, say, lanterns where you need a cover or shield for signalling.

The problem with “torch” is that there’s already a thing called “torch”, and now I don’t know which thing you mean. The word “flashlight” has avoided critical ambiguity in many of our Indiana Jones movies.

A pidgin language is a simplified language that appears when people need to communicate with each other, but they don’t have a common language. But if the situation lasts long enough for children to grow up learning the mixture of languages as their native language then it quickly evolves into a creole. The difference is that a creole is not a simplified language, and it has regular grammar. While growing up children always “reanalyze” their language to regularize grammar and fill in gaps in expressiveness. This is a main driver in shifts in all languages. The effect is especially profound when starting from an irregular, simplified language.

Because of reanalysis pidgins tend to either be temporary, or to give way to creoles. I don’t know of a pidgin that exists in the US right now. There are creoles - there are some details here

No, but I remember overhearing one of my teachers saying it’s actually helpful. That was in the early 90s in California.

I think of sourcehut has already-federated git hosting because to send the equivalent of a pull request instead of making an account you send patches via email using git’s built-in email workflow. Email is federated, therefore that is federated git collaboration.

Yes; first pull the black plastic piece out of the end of the refill. I read that there needs to be a little airflow into the refill for ink to flow, and when the back of the refill is jammed into the pen that can cut off airflow so you might cut a little notch in the end of the refill where the black plastic piece was. I also sometimes trim about 4mm off the end of the refill, or put a tiny bit of wadded paper in the pen for spacing. But I do this a little differently every time I put a new refill in.

Pilot Hi-Tec-C is a gel pen with refills that happen to fit in the Space Pen. It puts down a crisp, fine line.

The problem with the stock Space Pen is that it’s a messy ballpoint. I might be getting worse-than-typical results due to being left handed, but in general I find ballpoints don’t write crisp lines, and the ink smudges on my hand much more than gel pens do. But with the gel swap I do lose the feature of being able to write upside-down.

I carry a Fisher Space Pen everywhere, but I switched its cartridge for Pilot Hi-Tec-C refills. It takes a little fiddling to get the refill in there, but once it’s in it works great!

In which case you’re probably using a predefined 64-bit floating point number, which I think is accurate to 15 digits.