This is something I worry about: As most of us spend less time in front of books (and each other) and more time in front of computers, are we gradually training ourselves to read computer-speak more easily than printed language? Many of us are now more comfortable engaging with web page, PDFs, menus, links and lists than we are with those pre-compiled and edited, clunky physical contraptions we call books. I notice myself reading offline less and less, and I worry about what that says for my mind and the nature of my thinking.

I suppose that’s why I was interested in Nicholas Carr’s recent article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. He makes a similar confession, although, despite much rambling and speculation, doesn’t arrive at any helpful conclusions to help us explain this shift.

Motoko Rich has a related article in today’s Times, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” which scarily illustrates how today’s teenagers with Internet access may never read an actual book. Until this morning, I had only worried about my generation — I remember being so engrossed in reading as a child that my parents would have to put a hand between my eyes and the page in order to get my attention — but now we see the first generation that will live their entire lives with high-speed net access. I was born “unplugged,” and opted in at my own volition. But these kids were born plugged in, and they may never know life any other way.

So in 20, 30 years, when these kids are our leaders, debaters, thinkers, policy makers and caretakers, what and how will they be thinking?

A new game called Rolando has been announced for iPhone. I don’t totally understand what’s going on in the video above, but it looks a lot like the Phun, the ingenious-yet-silly physics experimentation app that Jason and Elaine have mentioned. Maybe this developer took the Phun engine and adapted it into a game, adding some interesting finger-touch controls?

I recently got my invitation to join the beta test of Fire Eagle, a new location-tracking service from Yahoo. Now, technically, it doesn’t “track” where you are, but rather, when you tell it where you are, it listens, and then shares that information with other online applications that you approve. The more apps you plug into it, the more useful it is.

For example, an app on my iPhone could monitor my geographical location and ping Fire Eagle with an update every so often. So iPhone says “now he’s in New York,” and Fire Eagle updates its record. Then, say my weather-tracking app checks with Fire Eagle, which tells it “last I heard, he’s in New York.” So the weather app says “cool, thanks” and then presents me with the forecast in NYC automatically, and I go “whoa, how did you know I went to New York? You’re just a silly weather app.”

Fire Eagle bills itself as “the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online,” and so far, I’d say it lives up to that promise. Although it’s essentially just a database that tracks only one thing (your location), the more applications and devices that become “location-aware” by connecting to this service, the more useful it will become.

I should mention that, of course, there are huge privacy concerns (or should be) whenever people voluntarily share their whereabouts with a corporate entity, but Yahoo swears that they retain only your most recent location and no historical data. (Of course, other services that you authorize to access your Fire Eagle data may retain the information longer.) I appreciate that the UI even has a “My Privacy” page that enables you to temporarily “hide” yourself and ostensibly delete all your location data from Yahoo servers.