The Sunday Brew #165
In this brew: AI adoption rate by countries in a picture | Empty Name & Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon | NASA extracts Oxygen from lunar soil, Meta's Grief Tech AI patent & Trusted Tech Alliance
The Sunday Brew | Issue #3 Feb ‘26 | Free
Welcome to The Sunday Brew, weekly 1-2-3 newsletter by The Percolator. Every Sunday we drop in your inbox 1 story in a picture, 2 concepts, ideas or frameworks to expand your horizons and 3 news from the week, to keep you updated.
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ONE STORY IN A PICTURE
TWO IDEAS, FRAMEWORKS OR CONCEPTS
This week we bring to you two Concepts - Empty Name & Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon
Empty Name
In the philosophy of language, an Empty Name is a proper name that does not actually refer to any object in reality, even though speakers can meaningfully use it in sentences.
Classic examples include mythical or fictional names such as “Pegasus” or “Sherlock Holmes”: there is no concrete entity these names pick out, yet we still seem to understand statements like “Pegasus has two wings” or “Sherlock Holmes lives in London.” This produces a central puzzle: if the meaning of a proper name is just the object it refers to, how can a name with no referent still participate in apparently meaningful, sometimes even truth‑evaluatable, discourse?
Different theories respond in different ways. Descriptivist or Fregean approaches say that even when a name is empty it carries a “sense,” roughly a cluster of descriptions shared by competent speakers (for instance, “winged horse of Greek mythology” for “Pegasus”), and this sense underwrites our understanding of sentences using the name. Direct‑reference or Millian theories instead claim that names contribute only their bearer to meaning; so if there is no bearer, strictly speaking the name contributes nothing and sentences containing it lack a standard truth value, even if we have strong intuitions that such sentences are meaningful.
Contemporary work often tries to reconcile these intuitions by introducing notions like “gappy propositions,” metalinguistic reinterpretations, or pretence, allowing empty names to function in thought, fiction, and negative existential claims (“Pegasus does not exist”) without committing us to strange ontologies.
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Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon
The Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion, is a cognitive bias where something you’ve just noticed or learned about suddenly seems to appear everywhere you look. Importantly, the thing itself is usually not occurring more often; what has changed is your mental spotlight.
Psychologists explain this using two interacting processes. First is selective attention: once an idea, word, or object becomes salient to you, say a new car model or an obscure concept, your brain tags it as relevant, so you start picking it out from the background noise of daily life. Second is confirmation bias: each time you notice it again, you treat that as “evidence” that it’s suddenly ubiquitous, while largely ignoring all the moments when it is absent, reinforcing the illusion of a surge in frequency.
The name itself originated informally in the 1990s, when a newspaper reader reported repeatedly encountering references to the German radical group “Baader–Meinhof” shortly after first learning about it, and the label stuck even after researchers popularized the more neutral term “frequency illusion.”
A simple example: you learn the word “sonder” today and then hear it in a podcast, see it in a tweet, and spot it in a book in the same week; it feels as if the world has started using the word more, but you’ve probably just started noticing what was already there. This phenomenon is mostly harmless, but it matters because it shows how easily our sense of “what’s common” can be distorted, feeding into misjudgements about trends, public opinion, risks, or even our own “signs from the universe.”
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THREE NEWS FROM THE WEEK
NASA’s CaRD Project Harnesses Solar Energy to Extract Oxygen from Lunar Soil
NASA has achieved a landmark breakthrough in its quest to enable sustainable lunar exploration, successfully using solar energy to extract oxygen from simulated lunar soil through its Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project.
The test marks a major step toward developing in-situ resource utilization technologies that could support long-term human presence on the Moon by producing oxygen for life support and rocket propellant directly from lunar materials.
Carried out through a multi-centre collaboration, the CaRD initiative united the expertise of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Glenn Research Center, and Kennedy Space Center along with industrial partners such as Sierra Space and Composite Mirror Applications. The technology relies on concentrating sunlight onto simulated regolith to trigger a carbothermal reaction that produces carbon monoxide, confirming the feasibility of extracting oxygen without using Earth-supplied energy sources.
Building on earlier breakthroughs, NASA first demonstrated oxygen extraction using laser-simulated sunlight in 2023, reaching technology readiness level six. By 2024, Sierra Space’s carbothermal reactor achieved automated oxygen extraction in a lunar-like vacuum at extreme temperatures up to 1,800°C.
As part of NASA’s broader Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon and eventually extend exploration to Mars, the CaRD system could eventually generate several times its own weight in oxygen annually on the lunar surface. According to project lead Aaron Paz, this advance represents a vital step toward creating a self-sustaining lunar economy powered by the Sun.
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Meta Patents AI to Simulate Users’ Online Presence After Death
Meta Platforms has secured a U.S. patent for artificial intelligence technology designed to mimic users’ social media activity even after death.
The patent, filed in 2023 and approved in December 2025, details how AI could be trained on a user’s digital footprint, including posts, comments, messages, and interactions, to recreate their online persona. The system could autonomously engage with others by liking posts, replying to messages, or simulating video calls, effectively allowing digital “life” to continue beyond physical existence.
Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, is listed as the inventor. The patent describes potential use cases such as maintaining accounts for deceased users or sustaining engagement for creators during inactivity.
However, critics warn of profound ethical and social consequences. Scholars like Edina Harbinja from the University of Birmingham argue that such technology raises complex questions about consent, posthumous privacy, identity, and emotional manipulation. Experts suggest Meta’s larger incentive could be sustained engagement and data collection rather than memorialization.
A Meta spokesperson stated that there are no current plans to deploy the system and that patents do not guarantee product development. Still, the move echoes similar industry efforts: Microsoft patented comparable “digital clone” technology in 2021 but halted it over ethical concerns. Meanwhile, a rising “grief tech” sector, with start-ups like StoryFile and HereAfter AI, is commercializing virtual afterlife experiences. As AI advances, the boundary between digital immortality and emotional exploitation is becoming increasingly blurred.
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Microsoft, Ericsson and 13 Global Tech Giants Form Trusted Tech Alliance to Tackle Digital Nationalism
Microsoft and Ericsson have convened a new global coalition, the Trusted Tech Alliance, uniting 15 major technology companies across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America to promote cross‑border digital trust. Announced at the Munich Security Conference, the alliance seeks to offer a shared framework for secure, transparent, and interoperable technology spanning connectivity, cloud, semiconductors, software, and AI.
Positioned as a counterweight to rising digital nationalism and sovereignty-driven restrictions, the alliance emphasizes that technology trust should be grounded in verifiable practices rather than the nationality of providers. Microsoft President Brad Smith framed it as a way for like‑minded firms to uphold high global standards and maintain trusted digital flows amid geopolitical fragmentation. Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm underscored that no country can achieve full technological sovereignty alone, arguing that collaboration is essential to keep digital infrastructure both secure and open.
Members including Microsoft, Ericsson, Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Jio, Nokia, SAP, and others have committed to five principles covering transparent governance and ethics, operational transparency with secure development and independent assessments, rigorous supply‑chain security, support for open and cooperative digital ecosystems, and respect for rule of law and data protection.
The alliance also highlights AI safety, with Anthropic stressing the need for widely used AI models to be safe, reliable, and transparently developed as their capabilities grow. Over time, the group plans to expand membership and work with governments to strengthen resilience, competitiveness, and trust in the global digital stack.
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