What makes a 100%?

I got an interesting forward from my dad today. Usually I don't read bulky Powerpoints, but this one was actually quite neat, so I thought I'd share it with everyone. The PPT was about “What do we need to get 100% out of life?” and the logic went something like this – lets say we encode each letter in the alphabet with its position. So A would be 1, B would be 2, Z would be 26 and so on. You get the idea. This is where the interesting bit begins – what we'll do is, take a few words which seem important in life to us, and just add up the numbers to see how they fare:

• LUCK: L + U + C + K = 12 + 21 + 3 + 11 = 47%
• LOVE: L + O + V + E = 12 + 15 + 22 + 5 = 54%
• MONEY: M + O + N + E + Y = 13 + 15 + 14 + 5 + 25 = 72%
• KNOWLEDGE: K + N + O + W + L + E + D + G + E = 11 + 14 + 15 + 23 + 12 + 5 + 4 + 7 + 5 = 96%
• LEADERSHIP: L + E + A + D + E + R + S + H + I + P = 12 + 5 + 1 + 4 + 5 + 18 + 19 + 8 + 9 + 16 = 97%
• HARDWORK: H + A + R + D + W + O + R + K = 8 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 23 + 15 + 18 + 11 = 98%
• ATTITUDE: A + T + T + I + T + U + D + E = 1 + 20 + 20 + 9 + 20 + 21 + 4 + 5 = 100%

I thought it was pretty neat. And some good food for thought.

BTW, here's the Python snippet I wrote to generate the above:

import sys
 
base = 64
sum = 0
letters = ''
numbers = ''
for i in sys.argv[1]:
    sum += ord(i) - base
    letters += i
    letters += ' + '
    numbers += str(ord(i) - base)
    numbers += ' + '
 
print "%s = %s = %d%%" % (letters[:-3], numbers[:-3], sum)

Update: A slightly shorter, but perhaps more elegant way of doing the same thing:

import sys
word = sys.argv[1]
s = reduce(lambda x,y: x + (ord(y) - 64), word, 0)
l = reduce(lambda x, y: x + ' + ' + y, word)
n = reduce(lambda x,y: x + ' + ' + str(ord(y)-64), word, '')
print "%s = %s = %d%%" % (l, n[2:], s)