Crystal Eastman was a lawyer, journalist, feminist and socialist. She was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1881. Her parents were both Congregational Church clergy and were the pastors at a church near Elmira, New York. Her brother was Max Eastman, editor of THE MASSES.

She graduated from Vassar College in 1903, received an MA in Sociology from Columbia University in 1904 and graduated second in her class from New York University Law School in 1907.

Miss Eastman’s first job was to investigate labor conditions for the Pittsburgh Survey sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Her report “Work Accidents and the Law” became a classic and resulted in the adoption of the first workmen’s compensation statue in the United States. She worked as an investigating attorney for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations during the Wilson administration.

She married Wallace Benedict and settled in Milwaukee. While there she managed an unsuccessful 1912 Wisconsin suffrage battle. Her marriage ended in divorce and she returned to New York where she helped to found the militant Congressional Union which eventually became the National Women’s Party. After the passage of the landmark 19th Amendment in 1920 which gave the right to vote to women, she and three others wrote the Equal Rights Amendment first introduced in 1923.

Eastman was a strong anti-militarist and was one of the founders of the Women’s Peace Party which is now the oldest women’s peace organization—The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She argued against America’s going to war against Mexico in 1916, campaigned against the draft, and lobbied against American participation in World War 1. When the U.S. entered the First World War she and Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau to protect conscientious objectors. This organization would become the A.C.L.U.

In 1916 she married Walter Fuller, an English editor and anti-war activist. They lived at 71 Mt. Airy Road and had two children, Jeffrey and Annis.

She was a contributor to THE MASSES and after it stopped publication in 1917 she and her brother Max co-owned and published The Liberator, a radical journal of politics, art and literature.

At the close of World War 1 her husband, Walter Fuller, returned to England to seek work. For the next several years Crystal and her family would live part of the time in England and the rest in New York where she was blacklisted and rendered unemployable during the red scare of 1919-1920. During the following years her only paid work was for the feminist journals Time and Tide and Equal Rights.

Suffering from painful nephritis for many years, Crystal Eastman died in 1928.

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  • FunkyStuff [he/him]
    ·
    4 days ago

    I've seen so many tutorials explaining train signals for Satisfactory and Factorio. But after experimenting for a while and looking at a bunch of successful designs, these are the things I wish any of them had mentioned.

    Long rant
    • Chain signals' purpose is to carve out paths that trains have to follow in their entirety without stopping until they're at the end of the path. Use them in intersections with block signals at the exits, with as many chain signals along the intersection as necessary to split all the crossings into separate blocks along the paths. That way, if a train wants to go through a crossing, it obstructs nobody except the trains that also need to go through that specific crossing.
    • There's 2 main reasons deadlocks happen. Too many trains in a closed loop, and trains entering blocks they're unable to leave because of another train that's in the same situation, in a cycle that eventually leads back into itself.
    • There's 2 countermeasures for the first deadlock cause. You either make the closed loop have more blocks that are big enough to contain the trains going through them, or you replace all block signals with chain signals so only one train can path through any given section of the loop at a time. Use the former for big loops that have stations connected to it. Use the latter for roundabouts or loops that are only used for routing purposes.
    • The second cause for roundabouts is more complex. It always can be solved by replacing block signals with path signals, but the tricky part is understanding which layouts can cause trains to end up on a cyclical dependency which creates a deadlock, so you can minimize the number of chain signals (and therefore have less waiting for your trains). When in doubt, start by having the problem zone be one big block with chain signals coming in and block signals coming out. This configuration is always safe because only one train will ever be inside the area where a deadlock could happen, and it will never stop inside that area. Chain signals can be added before and after crossings to allow for faster routing, and block signals can be used anywhere that a train may stop without blocking any paths (except for when your deadlock is actually of the first type, then you can't have trains wait anywhere inside the loop!). Doing this will allow other trains to enter the area simultaneously, but on different paths, which will still prevent deadlocks from happening. Otherwise, use block signals at your own risk.
    • Maximizing throughput in an intersection is all about making sure that trains can get from one side to the other in the largest number of possible scenarios. Two trains making a right turn in a RHD system should never need to wait for each other. Generally, an optimized intersection should never have two pieces of rail that don't intersect be part of the same block, because that means trains going in different rails that don't interact will be held back from going on the intersection simultaneously. These optimizations can seem small, but if a single train has to stop for any amount of time, it loses all its velocity and needs to accelerate again, which will slow down all trains directly behind it too.
    • The secret to having fast traffic in a main rail line is smart placing of block signals. When trains move fast, they reserve blocks ahead of themselves, all the distance that the train will take to brake to a complete stop. If you don't have very frequent block signal placement, it can mean that a train takes up a large block that it won't reach for another few seconds. The fact that the train is taking up that block means that other trains routing into that block will slow down, which is entirely unnecessary. The opposite is also true, a train that's going fast will slow down if the block ahead of it is occupied, even if the occupying train is several hundred meters away. So make sure you don't have any unnecessarily large blocks, especially where trains are going fast, and near intersections where trains are speeding up!