Needless to say, I bristle when Cliff Stoll glosses over the reasons why the Net can’t provide easy answers to questions such as “What political compromises caused Bismarck to become the capital of North Dakota?” or “Why isn’t Kyoto the capital of today’s Japan?” or “What’s the history of the Ruhr Valley, and what are the implications of its new Eastern European competition?” Of course. Worried about piracy, publishers have understandably kept their textbooks off the Net. The last laugh, however, just may be on the more zealous of the copyright interests. Right now Stoll couldn’t be more correct about the need for more and better books on the Net; but as shown by, say, MendelWeb, the academic community is doing plenty on its own. And if this keeps up, the demand for copyrighted, commercial books, the kind that feed me, my editors, and yes, my publishers, too, could suffer. Far better to have a national digital library with privately originated books available from the very start. Ahead I’ll examine more closely some scientific and educational uses of the Net. Selections—yes, the print kind, not the Jernigan variety—will appear on: • The “hows,” the positives, and the negatives of the Visible Human Project—it stands out for reasons beyond the drama. The Clinton administration has encouraged high-bandwidth, scientific users of the Net. The original Visible Man requires sixteen gigabytes of storage—enough space to hold fifty _Encyclopaedia Britannica_s. Some say this isn’t the best use of Net resources. I disagree, however, and I’ll tell why. Along the way I’ll pass on information about the Internet’s Visible Man before he became so visible. • High school use of the Internet. The United States is hardly the only nation with thousands of children in cyberspace—countries ranging from Canada to Singapore are putting students online, directly or indirectly. Significantly, computers and networks can help students outside the elite. Some proof of this comes from Nova Scotia, where, for several years, a high school has been using the Internet to benefit some “at-risk” students. I’ll tell you about the Internet success that a Canadian teacher named Jeff Doran has enjoyed with leather-jacketed teenagers. Many are racing into the computer lab and, let’s hope, away from fates such as Paul Jernigan’s. The Internet project at Park View Education Centre is far from an unqualified triumph—many Park View teachers still fear the technology—but patterns there suggest a vast potential for educational uses of the Net if schools will modernize their curricula. The Visible Man