Poppies and Chrome - I must admit that the actual story played second fiddle to the brilliant idea that opened it. I just love the utter simplicity of it. "I know! Instead of actually fixing the world, we'll make these kickass sunglasses that make it appear as if nothing is wrong in the first place!" It's brilliant! Genius! Why didn't we think of it sooner?!
Seriously, I loved that. I then spent the rest of the story waiting to gather more clues about this magnificent piece of technology. I must confess that I am amazed that a pair of glasses have the memory and processing power required to do such complex on-the-fly video manipulation, not to mention sounds and smells as well. Plus it remembers configurations of how it rendered other people...! I am in awe.
Don't ask me about the story itself, I have no idea what went on, I wasn't paying attention.
Rabbi Aaron Meets Satan - While listening to this I realized that many, many people would have trouble with the issues at hand, the conflicts and the terminology. And so, as a free (as in beer) service I will try to explain.
Jews believe that God's seat on Earth is in Jerusalem. Therefore, when praying, they face towards Jerusalem. On Earth that isn't a problem, some basic knowledge of geography and geometry is required, but not much. The question arises, to where does one pray when not actually on Earth? In Earth orbit the answer is rather simple, but on another planet things begin to get complicated. And they get even worse if one is in a different solar system. That, I think, is the "Jerusalem issue".
Another thing I think people may have trouble with is the times. The Jewish day starts at sunset and ends at sunset. Besides that, different times of the day are allotted for different religious observances, prayer times and such. Different times of day include astronomical noon (exactly halfway between sunrise and sunset, regardless of the angle of the sun), astronomical night (when the sun is a certain number of degrees below the horizon), day-break and certain partitions of the day (for example: one-quarter of the time between sunrise and sunset). Now all of this is strictly calculated for a standard Earth-sun system with approximately 24 hour days. What happens when one orbits a different Sun? Or is on a moon, for that mater? Does one maintain time based on where from Earth he or she took off from? Or from Jerusalem? Or from the new day-night system?
Other than that I think everybody is familiar with Jewish prohibitions on preparing and eating kosher food.
Oh, one last thing, it is common Jewish practice to ask a rabbi a question regarding Jewish law (halacha) where one is in doubt. This is called a she'ela in Hebrew, and may be pronounced differently based on one's descent and local accents (shi'lah is common). Another common Jewish practice is to read tehilim (pronounced with a hard 'h' as in "hill" and not like Tim read it) which is the book of Psalms to ward off evil or save one's soul.
And that's it.
The story was rather mediocre. Just a regular deal-with-the-devil story set in space. I'd much rather like to hear the story of how Judaism became the chief religion on Earth and how they were the ones who populated the stars.
Space opera that doesn't involve atheists is always more interesting to me, because many religions place their deity(ies) in "heaven". So what happens when these people go to the heavens and find other planets, but no deity? How do they cope? And how do they cope with Earth being the birthplace of humanity, and therefore their religion? In our story they didn't cope so well. The rabbi's entire family moved to Israel (the term "made aliya").
Islam and Judaism seem to be not so well equipped to deal with space exploration, due to the many religious restrictions imposed upon the devout. We have seen other stories where Buddhism, Christianity and other religions were the ones to settle the stars. But the stricter monotheistic religions... not so much. So I was glad to hear this story, for that regard, but the story itself was quite lacking in everything that makes a good story.
Fine-Tuning the Universe - This was an interesting contrast to the previous story, a robots society's attempt at answering the age-old question.
Again, the idea behind the story appealed to me much more than the story itself. The story seemed to lack climax and resolution. It just sort of happened. I think I'd rather read the philosophical papers written in that society.
So, the final score seems to be.... potato. I didn't actually like any of the stories as stories, but I did like some of the ideas that they came with. So how does one grade that on a number-based system?