Tactical Knurling

These are flashlights. There is no doubt whatever about that. They may not be the most high-end flashlights in the world or have the most impressive, razzle-dazzle features, but it should be immediately clear to even the meanest intelligence that they are, in fact, flashlights.

Now, imagine you’re an alien sent to Earth with the mission of understanding how humans categorize objects. Or a general purpose artificial intelligence tasked with same. How might you go about creating categories such that you could determine with as much speed and precision as a human what constitutes a flashlight?

You might come up with a criterion such as:

• Emits light

But of course this is too broad, so you might add an AND statement:

• Is handheld

That covers most of it, right? Oh wait, smartphones meet those criteria. How about adding:

• Is cylindrical
• Emits light perpendicularly to the axis on which it is held in the hand

(The latter only if you were a really nerdy alien)

These Power Style CREE LED Military Flashlights certainly conform to those criteria and have some features not captured in the general category. But as their name implies they also fall into another, more complicated categorization: “Military.” And we’ll include with this the even more baffling “Tactical.”

What the hell does that mean?

Not having served, ourselves, or having learned much about tactics beyond those in Ivalice, we are more like the aliens than the humans in this situation, but given the products we see that are described as “Military” and “Tactical," here are our best guesses as to their defining characteristics:

• Are black

That’s the big umbrella. Even tactical traffic cones are, presumably, black as night. Next:

• Are heavier than they seem like they would be

Members of the military, it seems, enjoy carrying the heaviest equipment possible. And let’s not forget possibly the most important feature of a military or tactical product:

• Have, somewhere on their surface, textured (or more likely knurled) metal (“knu-metal” as we believe it is called among cognoscenti).

Given all that, are these military-style flashlights? Well, they are surprisingly heavy objects that emit light perpendicular to the axis of their black metal cylindrical handles, so: yes.