When I was 14 (1995), I'd been doing shoddy programming for a couple years and read an article in Newsweek about genetic algorithms and somewhat naïvely decided to look up the guy interviewed (on compuserve) and drop him a mail (David E. Goldberg). He went to the trouble to not only answer me, but run off a huge packet of copies of articles and snail-mailed them to me. That seriously changed my life. That's when I learned what computer science really was. Answering questions like this is important, in my opinion, even if you get duped once in a while.

Whoa, just found it again: http://www.newsweek.com/id/103827/output/print