You don’t have to delve far into the realms of scriptwriting before you’ll be pointed towards a book called Story by Robert McKee, which explains why scriptwriting is more akin to engineering than art. McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.

McKee has become so influential that huge numbers of films, perhaps most of them, and many TV series are now written using his rules. But the real measure of his success is that there are even anti-McKee films such as Adaptation that attempt to burst McKee’s bubble.

Given that scriptwriting has become so formulaic, shouldn’t science have a role to play in analysing it? That’s exactly what Fionn Murtagh and pals at the Royal Holloway College, University of London have done in a project that analyses scripts in a repeatable, unambiguous and potentially-automatic way.

Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.

That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.

What’s interesting about the work is that Murtagh and mates want to use their technique to develop a kind of project management software for scriptwriting. That’s an ambitious goal but one that might find a handy niche market, particularly since many scripts, TV serials in particular, are now written by teams rather than individuals and so need careful project management from the start.

The challenge for Murtagh and co will be to turn this aproach into a bug-free, easy-to-use package that has the potential to become commercially viable. And for that they’ll almost certainly need some outside help and funding. Anybody got any spare cash?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0805.3799: The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts

…so said Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon. And how right they turned out to be.

The statistical rules governing the distribution of money and wealth bear more than a passing resemblance to the ideal gas laws. In fact, the statistical mechanics of money and wealth distribution have their own sub-headings in the Econophysics chapter of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science. There can be no greater accolade for an incipient field of endeavor than that.

The chapter is an excellent introduction to the physics of money, a new science that I know will be close to yer heart. It gives the history of the topic as well as the current state of the field. Believe me, this is gonna be a growth area, particularly when somebody starts mapping the way money flows through the economy onto the social structures and webs that exist within society. It’s gonna be dynamite.

Now I know what ya’ll thinkin. There ought to be some kinda secret knowledge known only to physicists that allows them to horde more than their fair share of this stuff. After all, Pink Floyd managed it.

If there is, nobody told Victor “Yak” Yakovenko, the author. Judging by Yak Yak’s dress sense, econophysics still don’t pay.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.3662: Statistical Mechanics Approach to Econophysics