Mad scramble for profits; Which came first, the ticker or the egg?(PERSPECTIVES)(Editorial)

Alas, Easter has come and gone, but perhaps it's not too late to bestow upon that special shareholder in your life a very special gift -- a high-tech contraption that has to be one of the oddest inventions to emerge in the computer age.

It's called the Stock Orb, and it's an egg-shaped gizmo that changes color according to how well things are going with the Dow Jones industrial average.

Green means business is booming, red means the arrow's pointing down, and yellow is just so-so. (No word on what's displayed when a company starts inflating its earnings. A big, tilted "E," maybe?)

The manufacturer, Ambient Devices of Cambridge, Mass., says the …