I'm sure Phil would appreciate the distinction you are making & you can tell him about it at his Bulletin board:
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/index.php
But for the general public your nitpicking probably wouldn't be as significant- all non-fictional prose is not wording from an engineer's manual.
I've never held a piece of shuttle tile in my hand but my guess is that one easily crumbling in your hands is certainly an "exaggeration".

"Gas viscosity is one of the parameters used in the Fay-Riddell equation. If the gas viscosity is set to zero then the heat flux goes to zero. This of course is impossible but it demonstrates that viscosity (friction) plays a role in heat flux."

When you compress gas, the gas heats up due to friction of the gas molecules, but not "significantly" from the friction of whatever device you are using to compress the gas. There people out there who wouldn't know why cool air at 1 atm gets hot when compressed to 10 atm. "Fay-Riddell equation" is fairly meanless to me and to other people even less so. Now, maybe I should look up this "Fay-Riddell equation"- probably pretty important if I'm trying to fiqure out the problems of building a pipelauncher, but then again "what do we *have* engineers for but to know all this crap":)