Consolidated Stale Pull Requests & Cleanup

* Resolved conflicts from olethanh's stale pull request #29, squashed his commits
* Included jlowin's fixes from #54
* Fixed some typos, added some docstrings
I did make that change not only to make the function more concise but mainly because that way, you can know what the default is directly from looking at the function definition. Which helps a lot if you have an IDE that display them or if you export them into your documentation.