(resent) Two Cultures Gamma ray blues. Astrophysicist Peter Usher had never heard of hip-hop music until last week when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it was sending the Pennsylvania State University professor emeritus an album and T-shirt featuring rhythm-and-blues singer Usher Raymond. RIAA says it's mailing the gifts to apologize for having erroneously sent out a copyright infringement notice to Usher's department on 8 May. The notice said that the department's FTP server was illegally distributing songs by the Grammy Award-winning artist. The reason for the error was traced to Usher's research papers on the server and a song about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which was in part designed by Penn State. The combination of "Usher" and the "mp3" suffix raised a red flag for RIAA's Web-snooping bots, which routinely trawl the Internet to monitor unlawful trafficking of music files. RIAA withdrew the notice and apologized to Penn State last week. Usher, who now lives in Durham, North Carolina, after retiring in 1999, is annoyed by the ruckus but volunteers to "wear the T-shirt on Halloween." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol300/issue5623/r-samples.shtml