As a kid, I raised my hand too often in class and looked forward to science projects. I drew pictures of space ships and aliens on my notebooks before rushing home after school to play on my IBM 386. As for many young nerds, school could make for a solitary life. I related to a set of books—the My Teacher Is an Alien series—better than I could with most of my lunch-table peers.

If you are in your mid 20s like me, chances are you've read the series, penned by Bruce Coville, one of the most acclaimed names in children's sci-fi. It's the ongoing story of a young boy named Peter who—kidnapped by an alien disguised as his teacher—visits other planets, travels on space ships and meets a universe of aliens first hand, before having to argue humanity's case against a galactic jury, lest they quarantine or even kill us for our warmongering ways. After rereading the series on a nostalgic rainy weekend, I decided to call up Coville and ask him what was going through his head when he wrote it all. It ends up, he's just as interesting now as I, at age eight, would have imagined him.

The devices Coville dreamed up for Peter's journey were amazing then, and still amazing now. Peter uses a URAT ("Universal Reader and Translator," kind of like a PDA on steroids) to teleport around a ship the size of New Jersey. Meanwhile his crush Susan is caught in a stasis forcefield, and his arch nemesis, Duncan the former dunce, is the smartest person alive following a zap to the brain. Some of the tech was and is farfetched, while much of what was once considered alien (literally) has become commonplace. The first book in the series was published back in 1989, before broadband, 3G wireless and laptops in every home.

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In an surprisingly frank and fresh exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, Steve Wozniak has left us some new gems of wisdom regarding the past, present, and future of Apple. Among his thoughts on Apple's fanboyism, stock overvaluation, upcoming products, and the iPhone limitations, the most surprising is his prediction that the iPod success will die soon, just like the Walkman and transistor radio did:

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Naoki Maru may live in Hikone, north of Kyoto, down the road from a samurai castle full of katana swords and armour, but for him, the ancient Japanese art of bushido is best carried out with robots, not people. King Kizer, the Maru family robot, has dominated the Robo-One tourney over the past three years, collecting US$50,000 in prize money. Maru, a factory engineer by day, is trying to perfect a way to make Kizer even more of an arse kicker using a technique he had seen many times in anime: A harness that captures human movements and translates them into robotic attacks and other gestures.

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Virgin Galactic's White Knight aircraft is pretty exciting. And here's a video that BoingBoingTV made of the aircraft's launch event, that has some interesting words on the craft and space travel from Sir Richard Branson, Scaled Composite's Burt Rutan and genuine spaceman and moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin himself. The best line? One that very few people in the world could say: "I wanted to go into space when I saw the moon landing. I've never had that opportunity, so I've had to build my own spacecraft!"—that's Branson. [BBTV]

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There's more than a little scepticism surrounding the new Martin Jetpack. Promising a new era of ultralight flight, many of the claims (altitude capabilities and safety, especially) sound too good to be true. Before we took our test flight, we asked Glenn Martin, inventor, some of the tougher questions that we hadn't seen asked anywhere else. Being a good sport, he actually answered them:

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There are two things that this Friday seems to be missing here on Giz. The first one is beer. The second is a healthy dose of rage. I'm hoping that the first one naturally turns into the second, although after watching the video above, I'm actually thinking that it might work the other way around.

You see, Logan over at Kotaku got pointed in the direction of this clips from ABC program Q&A. It's a fairly new show that lets people in the audience ask questions of politicians and their kind about topical current events.

As you can see from the video, the topic in question here is the need for an R18+ rating for games in Australia. What spews forth from the politicians' mouths is something many would find more offensive than any super-violent game - total ignorance. This wouldn't be so bad if they admitted they weren't in a position to make any kind of judgment, but instead most of them used it as an opportunity to propagate their own beliefs and opinions without a passing consideration for the facts.

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Here Joel interviews Syd Mead, designer on vehicles in movies such as Tron, Blade Runner and Aliens. Syd's secret to designing tomorrow: Overlay the future on top of the familiar. Worth a watch. [BBG]

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At last week's HTC Touch Diamond launch, I had a chance to sit down with HTC's CEO Peter Chou. I was going to chat with Horace Luke - their CIO - as well, but he had to run down to prepare the presentation.

The main focus was obviously the new Touch Diamond handset, but we also touched on things like the evolution of TouchFLO, the Touch Pro, HTC's pricing and their move into the UMPC market. He also deftly avoided most of my Android questions as well.

Here's part one of the interview:

Giz AU: With TouchFLO, what brought about the development of TouchFLO 3D - How did it morph from something "so simple that a baby can use it" to having a series of icons down the bottom?

Peter Chou: It's the same thing - trying to offer this kind of very intuitive, simple experience. However this is giving you a much more colourful, much more 3D animated kind of experience. If you go to the applications table, you can still enjoy the kind of TouchFLO experience.
 
This device is about one hand, one touch. We've tried to optimise the form factor in the hand and everything is one hand one touch, so that kind of concept.

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Bill Gates puts up with us, having granted us three interviews in the past three and a half years. It's an intense experience: Bill isn't always fond of making eye contact, and is known to snap at reporters who ask dumb questions. After all, he's not just the Andrew Carnegie--or Emperor Palpatine--of his time. He's also a guy who gets interviewed a hell of a lot, and doesn't stand for bush-league Q&A. But we have always enjoyed the guys company and even have had the opportunity to make him laugh a few times. Here's a quick look back at our three Bill interviews, in a Retromodo re-run fashion:

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Ever wanted to know more about the lovely, sweet, sexy, funny, and absolutely adorable* Addy Dugdale, Associate Editor, Disco Queen, and Pop Culture Smartypants At Large in Gizmodo? Then head to Born Rich and read her Cool Geek of the Week interview. Stay tuned for a Conan O'Brienesque "ADELAIDE! Seeeeecrets" segment soon. [Born Rich—*Full Disclosure: yes, she's my wife]

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