Icelandic App
The risk
of Icelanders accidentally
sleeping with a relative is apparently high enough to justify the creation of a
smartphone app to help prevent it.
Iceland isn't a big country. Most Icelanders are descended from the Norse and Celtic settlers that first began arriving on the island some time in the 700s and 800s, with few additions to the gene pool.
Roughly two-thirds of its 320,000
population live in and around the capital, Reykjavík, so the chances that
you're at least not-too-distantly-related to most of the strangers you walk
past in the street are high. Or, indeed, someone you might meet in a bar and go
home with.
Part of the problem, beyond the small population, is that Icelandic naming
conventions don't reflect someone's descendants.
Neither patronymic or matronymic, instead each person's father's first name
becomes the child's last name. Each new generation has a completely different
name to the name of the generation that preceded it. Cousins, aunts, uncles,
nieces, nephews -- all could have very different names.
The solution to this? Developers from Sad Engineers Studios created an Android app
that seeks to save any incredibly awkward revelations in the future by making
things clear now. It uses as its resource an online genealogical database
that contains records of more than 720,000 Icelanders going back 1,200 years
using as many records (church documents, census information, and so on) as
possible.
The simple idea is to make those records easily available for people so
they can figure out who they're related to. But the best feature is reserved
for when two people who both have the app meet -- they both get their
smartphones out and bump them together. If they share a grandparent, the app
will bring up an alert that it is most definitely not cool to go any further
than a handshake with that person. The feature is called
"Sifjaspellsspillir", or "Incest Spoiler".The new smartphone app
is on hand to help Icelanders avoid accidental incest. The app lets users
"bump" phones, and emits a warning alarm if they are closely related.
"Bump the app before you bump in bed," says the catchy slogan
The app won a competition held
to find the best use of the is site, according to the News of Iceland, which describes the
"Incest Spoiler" as "a precious feature" that will prevent
the situation where "someone goes all in with someone and then later runs
into that person at a family gathering some other time". This is a situation,
it claims, that "many people in Iceland have heard of or experienced".
The app has had almost 5,000 downloads since its launch a few days ago, and
its 4.6/5 rating attests to it satisfying a craving clearly felt among
Icelanders. However, at least one user has left a review that rues its timing:
"If I had this app earlier, it would have prevented me from going home
with someone that turned out to be a distant cousin".
Of course, all of humanity descends from a common ancestor, so technically
we're all guilty of getting down with a relative of sorts. Many famous and
respected people throughout history have ended up married to their first
cousins, like HG Wells or Albert Einstein -- though the fate (and family tree) of
Charles II of Spain should prove a warning to all of us of the health
consequences of in-breeding.
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