Nitpicking metaphors with modern engineering

"Jesus had said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven, but rocketry had thirty years of practice working with astonishingly small tolerances and rose to meet the challenge." - Scott Alexander's Unsong, chapter 39

The swoop from cultural highbrow to literal engineering terminology tickles my sense of humor. Is there a name for this genre? "Nerdbait"?

This post's theme word is ultracrepidarian (n/adj), "(one) giving opinions beyond one's area of expertise." Which is truly the ultracrepidarian, the literary scholar with opinions about engineering  details or the engineer who obliterates a metaphor with a cleverly-designed tool?

James Joyce

"In attempting to be completely faithful to real life, in all its true confusion and complexity, Joyce ended up writing a book that is fascinatingly, instructively unreadable." - Professor Eric Bulson, for The School of Life on Joyce's Finnegans Wake

This is serious. I have tried several times and I just keep putting Joyce's books back into the queue. Listening to this framing of Joyce's work makes me think I should bump up its priority and try to read it again.

This post's theme word is frustraneous (adj), "useless, unprofitable." The exercise of reading was frustrating but not frustraneous.