You meet someone, there is chemistry, and then come the introductory questions: What is your name? Come here often? Are you my cousin?
In Iceland, a country with a population of 320,000 where most people are distantly related, inadvertently kissing cousins is a real risk.
A 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,” the catchy slogan says.
Some are hailing it as a welcome solution to a very Icelandic form of social embarrassment.
“Everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and running into a girl you hooked up with some time ago,” said Einar Magnusson, a graphic designer in Reykjavik. “It’s not a good feeling when you realize that girl is a second cousin. People may think it’s funny, but [the app] is a necessity.”
The Islendiga-App, or “app of Icelanders,” is an idea that may only be possible in Iceland, where most of the population shares descent from a group of ninth-century Viking settlers and where an online database holds genealogical details of almost the entire population.
The app was created by three University of Iceland software engineering students for a contest calling for “new creative uses” of the Islendingabok, or Book of Icelanders, an online database of residents and their family trees stretching back 1,200 years.
Arnar Freyr Adalsteinsson, one of the trio, said it allows any two Icelanders to see how closely related they are, simply by touching phones.
“A small, but much talked about feature is the loosely translated ‘Incest Prevention Alarm’ that users can enable through the options menu, which notifies the user if the person he’s bumping with is too closely related,” Adalsteinsson said.
It is the latest twist on a long-standing passion for genealogy in Iceland, a volcanically active island in the North Atlantic that was unpopulated before Norse settlers arrived in 874. Their descendants built a small, relatively homogenous and — crucially — well-organized country, home to the world’s oldest parliament and devoted to thorough recordkeeping.
“The Icelandic sagas, written about 1,000 years ago, all begin with page after page of genealogy. It was the common man documenting his own history,” said Kari Stefansson, chief executive of Icelandic biotech company deCODE Genetics, which ran the contest behind the app.
The Book of Icelanders database was developed in 1997 by deCODE and software entrepreneur Fridrik Skulason. Compiled using census data, church records, family archives and a host of other information sources, it claims to have information on 95 percent of all Icelanders who have lived in the past 300 years.
The database can be scoured online by any Icelandic citizen or legal resident. The app makes the data available to Icelanders on their mobile phones — and adds the anti-incest feature.
Currently available for Android phones, it has been downloaded almost 4,000 times since it was launched earlier this month. The creators also hope to develop an iPhone version.
Stefansson said the “bump” feature is an attention-grabbing, but relatively minor aspect of an app that brings Icelanders’ love of genealogy into the 21st century.
He also hopes it will not convey the wrong impression about Iceland.
“The Icelandic nation is not inbred,” he said. “This app is interesting. It makes the data much more available, but the idea that it will be used by young people to make sure they don’t marry their cousins is of much more interest to the press than a reflection of reality.”
It may also be of limited use. Currently the alarm only alerts users if they and their new acquaintance have a common grandparent and most people already know who their first cousins are.
Adalsteinsson stresses that the app has other, less sexual uses.
“We added a birthday calendar to make sure you don’t forget your relatives’ birthdays,” he said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion