Thing is, I've been trying to find a moment to write down what happened to Bennett and me for a while now, but the demands of my audience rarely abate. I've hardly time to jot down a grocery list, let alone compose a personal chronicle. Bennett says I'm practically the Charles (as in Dickens) of scribblers devoted to mining the rich vein of a certain underappreciated sitcom of the nineteen-eighties, but I will leave that for history to judge. Besides, what does Bennett know? Just before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and do my "C: FB" conjuring, and I struck up a conversation with a young woman who confessed to being a creative-writing student. She told me that in her workshop they talk about the "occasion" of the story. Why is the narrator telling this tale now? What pressures or conditions have coalesced to move a person to speak? I feigned ignorance of the concept, though I'd heard it often in my own writing classes long ago. Instead, I told her that, if the installment I was presently crafting flowed from any occasion, it was this: Charles is anxious about the imminent disintegration of the universe via the ever-increasing tug of dark matter. Moreover, he's ticked off that his best buddy, Buddy, doesn't seem perturbed by the prospect. "How imminent?" the woman said, and sipped her Balkan, a new offering at Amok. When I informed her that he was the titular hero of "Charles in Charge," the most criminally uncelebrated television program of the Reagan era, the woman pursed her lips. "We all write fan fiction," I told her. "Some of us are just more honest about it." The young woman gathered up her belongings, moved to another table. Did she think I was being facetious? Still, if there is an occasion for the story I'm relating now, it's a bit nearer on the space-time continuum. My best buddy, Bennett, is in a vegetative state induced by an anoxic brain injury, and, if he doesn't wake up soon and vouch for me, I could be kicked out of our apartment.

A recent report emerging from the center of U.S. auto manufacturing rains on the AI parade with research results claiming autonomous vehicle algorithms fare poorly in bad weather. The study by researchers at Michigan State University found that even light rain or drizzle can interfere with algorithms used in self-driving car cameras. That could mean future fleets might initially be restricted to sunny states like Arizona, California and Florida. The Michigan State study determined that the core problem stems not from cameras used as primary sensors for detecting obstacles but the algorithms used to sort through computer vision data. "When we run these algorithms, we see very noticeable, tangible degradation in detection," Hayder Radha, a Michigan State University professor of electrical and computer engineering, told Automotive Newsin late November. "Even low-intensity rain can really create some serious problems, and as you increase the intensity, the performance of what we consider state-of-the-art mechanisms can almost become paralyzed," added Rahda, who oversaw the study.