source code - What explains the digitization effect experienced by Stevens in one of his "flashbacks"?

In the movie Source Code, during one of his "flashbacks," Stevens experiences the world appear to disintegrate, and "digitize." While watching the movie, you get the impression this is the result of a flaw/bug/glitch/whatever in the Source Code program.

But by the end of the movie we learn that the "flashbacks" were reality in an alternate timeline/universe

so it could not have been a simple glitch in the recreation of the flashback. What explains this disintegration/digitization effect he experienced?

phrases - Thinking way ahead and into unnecessary details

There are a couple idioms in English that get more or less at the heart of what you are trying to say. However, I can't think of any one idiom that is perfect.

put the cart before the horse

Basically, what this means is that you are putting things in the wrong order. This could be due to confusion about cause and effect, but it also covers situations where you are focusing on the details in the wrong order.

This idiom does not speak to the level of detail. For example, designing a moon rover before designing a rocket would be putting the cart before the horse.

arranging deck chairs on the Titanic

This means that you are focused on unimportant details for something that's going away. For example, re-writing the source code for a program that deprecated.

This has a negative connotation, and implies a waste of time and effort. However, sometimes, I've heard this idiom stretched to mean focusing on small details of a process that may or may not come to fruition.

don't count your chickens before they've hatched

This idiom addresses the case when you start working on X, which is dependent on Y, without knowing that Y is actually going to happen.

chronology - Does Batman Begins occur before Tim Burton's Batman?

I know that the movie Batman Begins [2005] was made many years after the movies Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman and Robin, but it seems to be set before all the other movies in the series.

I am not sure but after seeing all the movies I think it is based on a year much earlier than the other movies.

Does Batman Begins occur before Tim Burton's Batman?

pronunciation - Long vs. short vowels in English words of Latin origin

Yes, there is a way: you look it up in a dictionary.

What do you mean by long and short vowel, anyway? The stuff they teach schoolchildren? If so, then you really just use the “normal” “rules” for English vowels. Here are some possible sounds for u in Latin-derived words in English:

---

• /juː/ as in the stressed syllables cuticle, Europe, funeral, humor, purify, and urine, or in the unstressed syllable of accurate and mercury.


• /uː/ as in the stressed syllables of juniper, juror, Rubicon, and troubadour.

---

• /ʌ/ as in the stressed syllables of abundant, annul, culture, custom, number, jugular, pumice, and sulfur.


• /ɝ/, [ʌɹ] as in the stressed syllables of murmur, occur, recursive, urban, urgent, and Ursa Major.

---

• /ɚ/, [əɹ] as in the unstressed syllables of Excalibur, culture, murmur, lemur, and sulphur.


• /ə/ as in the unstressed syllables of album, asylum, bacterium, circus, focus, illustrate, proconsul, and suburbia.

---

There are many other possibilities besides. As you see, there really is nothing special about words that come from Latin in the list above.

Yes, a native speaker will be able to come up with something that makes sense even on a new word they haven’t seen before.

If you are talking not about English words, but rather about open and closed u in the traditional English pronunciation of Latin words, then that is perhaps something else again.

word choice - Which verb should be used with the nouns "repair/maintenance": "Make"/"Do"/"Carry out"/...?

The following sentence is used on a warning label:

All maintenance and repair must be done only by authorized personnel

I'm not quite sure that "do" is the proper verb to use with "maintenance and repair". Which verb would fit better with these nouns?

How do the differences between the replicants and Deckard evolve in Blade Runner?

I think that has to do the book, the movie adapts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? all people are a bit like zombies, they only want to go away from earth or follow a strange religion like Deckards wife does. In a scene in the book, another Blade Runner suspects Deckard to be a replicant and makes a test with him. I think, Philip K. Dick wanted to show, that the difference between humans and machines isn't that big, as we think.

In the movie Ridley Scott seems to make a little different point. For me the movie said, that androids are able to the same emotions and empathy as humans, if they develop it (so states the theory, that humanity is developed). Deckard makes like Rachel and Roy the progress to humanity, although they take different directions.

telescope - VLT interferometry vs E-ELT?

Ok, not sure where you get 200m from, the maximum baseline for the VLT interferometer is 130m. Nevertheless, your question still stands.

There are a number of reasons. Firstly, it is important to understand that with relatively limited number of baselines (4 VLTs = 6 baselines) one does not get actual images out of the interferometer, but rather "visibilities" that enable one to work out whether sources are double, extended or whatever. Second, the interferometry only works at infrared wavelengths. This is a technical issue that might be solved in the next decade or so, but a general rule of thumb is that the longer the baseline, the longer the wavelengths you will be limited to use. Thirdly, the light gathering power is limited to the light that can be gathered by the constituent telescopes. I think this also limits the kinds of instruments you can use since the required delay lines and optical components of the system make everything inefficient. Fourth, there are limitations of the abilities of optical/IR interferometers caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. This limits them to very small fields of view and the performance does not reach the ideal case. It also means that you are limited to bright objects because individual exposure times need to be very short.

The E-ELT is designed to work at optical and infrared wavelengths and will gather enormous amounts of light. Not everything in astronony needs spatial resolution; sometimes what you need is just a bigger light bucket. Examples include: deep imaging of the universe, gathering spectra from faint objects; accumulating enough photons to do transmission spectroscopy using exoplanet transits.

It's horses for courses really. At optical and IR wavelengths the future will likely be big telescopes in space and even bigger interferometers in space.