NaNoWriMo status: 5,911 words and counting. Worked out a preliminary plot line and am filling in the flesh. Getting there!

My Korean labmate alerted me to this amusing piece of news about a boy genius who parents, impatient with the “long” time needed for their child to graduate from high school, decided to register him for the middle school and high school registration examinations earlier this year. Having passed both examinations, Song Yoo-geun is now enrolled in a special progrem in Inha University “launched this year with the express aim of producing the country’s first Nobel Prize winner in science”. His intended area of research? Flying cars using “Ramond-Ramond or Neveu-Schwarz-Neveu-Schwarz forces [which] are able to compensate gravity as a consequence of supersymmetry”. « JoongAng Daily

The Korea Herald seems have a more comprehensive article, but it’s subscription only. However, piecing the story together from the blogosphere (plus finding a cached copy) begins to reveal a more sinister angle to this child wonder. (Go Technorati!)

Song Yoo-geun apparently impressed professors with his understanding of the Schrödinger equation, but wait, what’s this?

The interview was conducted mainly with the senior Song since Yoo-geun is lacking in his ability to communicate with adults.

Hmm, a child prodigy who needs his father to communicate on his behalf sounds awfully fishy to me.

Yet more fish on the parents:

I think it’s good to let my son do whatever he wants,” the father said. According to him, when Yoo-geun is engrossed in solving math problems or doing games, he often concentrates on them for up to 14 or 15 hours.

Parents who let their children do math for 15 hours at a time ought to reconsider what they are doing to their child. The world doesn’t need yet another socially dysfunctional ex-prodigy when he grows up.

The pseudoscience factor also seems to be strong in this one:

“It goes against Newton’s law. Everything on earth gets drawn to the surface by gravity, but in the case of flying cars, it’s different,” Song said. “There should exist the same opposite magnitude of power as the earth’s gravity-pull. So, a balance is formed between gravity and reaction, which makes flying cars float in the atmosphere,” he explained.

His parents also seem engrossed in building a paper trail for their darling child:

[Soon] set a record by completing elementary, junior-high and high school curricula in just nine months - a progression that normally takes Koreans 12 years - before being admitted to university[...]

Yoo-geun first made headlines in March last year when he received a certificate for information-processing, normally given to professional engineers in their 20s or 30s. A KBS-TV program introduced his extraordinary talent in physics last November.

In March this year, he went to an elementary school but after a few days said he didn’t feel suited to the school system. He took a test to obtain a diploma certifying graduation from elementary school, and passed it.

But the Song family became embroiled in legal disputes with the school authorities after they refused to approve the exam result and issue a diploma.

In April, the Song family won the case. Afterwards, on April 5, Yoo-geun passed the middle school-level entrance exam, followed on Aug. 3 by the high school-level entrance exam. In October he was admitted to the Physics Department of Inha University.