Isegoria

Charles Forelle and James Bandler explain how some executives managed The Perfect Payday:

On a summer day in 2002, shares of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. sank to their lowest level in a year. Oddly, that was good news for Chief Executive Jeffrey Rich.

His annual grant of stock options was dated that day, entitling him to buy stock at that price for years. Had they been dated a week later, when the stock was 27% higher, they’d have been far less rewarding. It was the same through much of Mr. Rich’s tenure: In a striking pattern, all six of his stock-option grants from 1995 to 2002 were dated just before a rise in the stock price, often at the bottom of a steep drop.

Just lucky? A Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the odds of this happening by chance are extraordinarily remote — around one in 300 billion. The odds of winning the multistate Powerball lottery with a $1 ticket are one in 146 million.

Suspecting such patterns aren’t due to chance, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining whether some option grants carry favorable grant dates for a different reason: They were backdated. The SEC is understood to be looking at about a dozen companies’ option grants with this in mind.

Andrew Arensburger explains How Not to Embarrass Yourself in an Argument With an Atheist:

Fortunately, for religious arguments, there is a simple technique: take your original argument, substitute some other faith, and see how convincing it sounds to you.

Let’s take, for example, the argument that “Millions have found purpose in life through Jesus. Their lives have been enriched beyond measure by the Bible.” This is undoubtedly true, but just how convincing is it to someone who isn’t already a Christian? To find out, let’s turn it around: “Millions have found purpose in life through the prophet Mohammed. Their lives have been enriched beyond measure by the Koran.”

Now raise your hand if you’ve just had a sudden urge to convert to Islam. I said, raise your hand if… anyone? No? Hmmm…

All right, what about “The Bible is thousands of years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!” Once again, let’s turn that around: “The Tao Te Ching is 2500 years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!”

Doesn’t really want to make you want to rush out and become a Taoist, does it?

Andy Bowers offers An Insider’s Guide to Trader Joe’s — For curious New Yorkers — who are getting their first Trader Joe’s:

If a normal supermarket is like a mall — filled with familiar, consistent, and humdrum name brands — Trader Joe’s is more like a good bazaar, with its eclectic and erratic selection and frequent surprises, both good and bad. And like any bazaar, it’s much easier to navigate with a little experienced help. So, with curious New Yorkers in mind, I asked friends and colleagues in Los Angeles to send me their TJ’s tips and warnings.

Scott McCartney’s “Middle Seat” readers say, Fly Now, Talk Later:

The boys from NPR’s popular ‘Car Talk’ radio program offer a free bumper sticker as a public service to reduce auto accidents among cellphone-distracted drivers: ‘Drive Now, Talk Later.’

Judging from the Middle Seat Mailbox this week, we ought to start our own public service campaign with a ‘Fly Now, Talk Later’ bumper sticker.

That’s because the FCC may allow cell phone use on planes:

On May 10, the Federal Communications Commission will auction off two licenses for air-to-ground communications that can be used for onboard cellular service or onboard Wi-Fi connections. The companies say a new technology called “pico cells” — antennas installed on airplanes that are supposed to keep phones from trying to link to antennas on the ground — will eliminate safety concerns for jets since the phones will operate at much lower power, and won’t interfere with navigation-signal receivers.

Tom Pilla of Microsoft confirms that Microsoft itself originated that iPod box parody video:

“It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding,” he said via e-mail.

Viruses regularly invade people’s cells, make new copies of themselves, and infect their host. Sometimes they get “stuck” in the host cell’s DNA. And sometimes they get stuck in an egg cell, which replicates and survives — and that viral DNA survives for millions of years. From The Sixty-Million-Year Virus:

Scientists can identify viruses lurking in our genome (known as endogenous retroviruses) by their distinctive DNA. A fully-functioning retrovirus sequence contains three genes — one for copying DNA, one for a shell, and one for escaping and invading cells. These genes are flanked by a series of repeating DNA, which allow viruses to be inserted or snipped out of their host’s genome. The human genome carries full-fledged retroviruses, as well as viruses in various state of decay. Scientists have identified 98,000 of these viruses, along with about 150,000 fragments of defunct viruses. All told, they make up 8 percent of the human genome. In many cases, the virus genes have disappeared altogether, leaving behind flanking repeats, which have been duplicated to millions of copies that take up about 40 percent of the genome. As a point of comparison, our ‘own’ genes — in other words, those that encode proteins that make up our bodies and allow our bodies live — make up only about one percent of the genome.