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.