De re metallica (Latin for On the Nature of Metals (Minerals)) is a book cataloguing the state of the art of mining, refining, and smelting metals, published in 1556. The author was Georg Bauer, whose pen name was the Latinized Georgius Agricola. The book remained the authoritative text on mining for 180 years after its publication. It was also an important chemistry text for the period and is significant in the history of chemistry.

Agricola had spent nine years in the Bohemian town of Joachimsthal, now in the Czech Republic. (Joachimsthal is famous for its silver mines and the origin of the word "Thaler" and, ultimately, "dollar.") After Joachimsthal, he spent the rest of his life in Chemnitz, a prominent mining town in Saxony. Both Joachimsthal and Chemnitz are in the Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains.

In 1912, the first English translation of De Re Metallica was privately published in London by subscription. The translators were Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer (and later President of the United States), and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, a geologist and Latinist. The translation is notable not only for its clarity of language, but for the extensive footnotes, which detail the classical references to mining and metals. Subsequent translations into other languages, including German, owe much to the Hoover translations, as their footnotes detail their difficulties with Agricola's invention of several hundred Latin expressions to cover Mediaeval German mining and milling terms that were unknown to classical Latin.

De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark important distinctions in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinctions are most recognized in philosophy of language and metaphysics.[1]

The literal translation of the phrase "de dicto" is "of (the) word", whereas de re translates to "of (the) thing". The original meaning of the Latin locutions is useful for understanding the living meaning of the phrases, in the distinctions they mark. The distinction is best understood by examples of intensional contexts of which we will consider three: a context of thought, a context of desire, and a context of modality.

There are two possible interpretations of the sentence “Peter believes someone is out to get him”. On one interpretation, ‘someone’ is unspecific and Peter suffers a general paranoia; he believes that it is true that a person is out to get him, but does not necessarily have any beliefs about who this person may be. What Peter believes is that the predicate ‘is out to get Peter’ is satisfied. This is the de dicto interpretation.

Marianne Evelyn Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades.

Her early work in pop and rock music in the 1960s was overshadowed by her struggle with drug abuse in the 1970s. During the first two-thirds of that decade, she produced only two little-noticed studio albums. After a long commercial absence, she returned late in 1979 with the highly acclaimed album, Broken English. Faithfull's subsequent solo work, often critically acclaimed, has at times been overshadowed by her personal history.

From 1966 to 1970, she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with Rolling Stones' lead singer, Mick Jagger. She co-wrote "Sister Morphine", which is featured on the Stones' Sticky Fingers album.

Faithfull was born in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British military officer and professor of psychology. Her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, was originally from Vienna, with aristocratic roots in the Habsburg Dynasty and Jewish ancestry on her maternal side. Erisso was a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Faithfull's maternal great great uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the nineteenth-century Austrian nobleman whose erotic novel, Venus in Furs, spawned the word "masochism". In regard to her roots in nobility, Faithfull commented in March 2007 prior to beginning the European leg of her tour, "I'm even going to Budapest, which is nice because I'm half English and half Austro Hungarian. I've inherited the title Baroness Sacher-Masoch—it comes from one of my great uncles who gave his name to masochism."

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed, born March 2, 1942, is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his solo career, which has spanned several decades. Though the Velvet Underground were a commercial failure in the late 1960s, the group has gained a considerable cult following in the years since its demise and has gone on to become one of the most widely cited and influential bands of the era. As the Velvet Underground's principal songwriter, Reed wrote about subjects of personal experience that rarely had been examined so openly in rock and roll, including sexuality and drug culture.

After his departure from the group, Reed began a solo career in 1971. He had a hit the following year with "Walk on the Wild Side", although he subsequently lacked the mainstream commercial success its chart status seemed to indicate. Reed's work as a solo artist frustrated critics wishing for a return of the Velvet Underground. In 1975, Reed released a double album of feedback loops, Metal Machine Music, upon which he later commented, "No one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive."

James Alan Hetfield (born August 3, 1963) is the rhythm guitarist, co-founder, main songwriter, and lead vocalist for the American heavy metal band Metallica. Hetfield co-founded Metallica in October 1981 after answering a classified advertisement by drummer Lars Ulrich in the Los Angeles newspaper The Recycler, searching for band members. Since then, Metallica has won nine Grammy Awards and released nine studio albums, three live albums, four extended plays and 24 singles. In 2009, Hetfield was ranked number 8 in Joel McIver's book The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists, and ranked twenty-fourth by Hit Parader on their list of the 100 Greatest Metal Vocalists of All Time.

Hetfield was born August 3, 1963. He is of German, English, Irish and Scottish descent. He has two older half-brothers from his mother's first marriage and one younger sister. He attended Downey High School his freshman and sophomore years.

His father, Virgil, was a truck driver who left the family when Hetfield was young. His mother, Cynthia, was a light opera singer. The two divorced in 1976. Virgil and Cynthia were very strict Christian Scientists, and in accordance with their beliefs, Hetfield's parents strongly disapproved of medicine or any other medical treatment and remained loyal to their faith even as Cynthia was dying from cancer. This upbringing became the inspiration for many of Hetfield's lyrics later in his career with Metallica, such as songs like "The God That Failed".