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In Iceland, Tap Cellphones To Avoid Incest
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Students at the University of Iceland have written an Android app that helps you avoid dating your cousins. The app accesses the Icelandic national genealogical database that contains information on all living citizens and their ancestors going back 1,100 years. Tapping two phones together will bring up an alert if you share a common grandparent." Just one of the consequences of having a population small enough (and well documented enough) to have a well-known genetic makeup.
Do you really need an app to tell you who's family?
"Tapping" anything seems to me like a very poor choice of words when talking about incest.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Tap that before you tap that.
would be a Game of Thrones theme.
I don't care, no app is going to tell me that I can't have sex with my sister's brother's cousin. ( I jest)
An alternate version is being rolled out in the US, based on a similar principle but with one minor change: recent shared ancestry highlights the "get procreatin'" indicator instead of the warning alert.
"I awoke in a daze - sticky, smelling of stale alcohol, only imagining that her head would hurt as badly as mine when she finally awoke. Vague memories of drinks, friends, laughter, and sex. Lots of sex. As I picked my pants up off the floor, my cell phone fell from the pocket and by some cruel twist of fate tapped her cell phone lying nearby..."
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
Having sex with your cousin is not incest. Incest is defined to be with direct 1st degree relatives of the same bloodline. You can even marry your cousin - perfectly legal. At least in Germany.
It will be very successful app in West Virginia
> In Iceland, Tap Cellphones To Avoid Incest
"Well, that's what we thought they'd use it for. Turns out 99% of people used it to find close relatives they didn't know to bang."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This app might be one of the most specific uses for a very specific set of people that probably wouldn't use it that often.
i guess they determined so many cousins and brothers and sisters and dads and moms were screwing each other that they needed to know whose who again....
every call is about this thus the gubermint needs to listen.
I'm not sure if that's coincidental, or intended.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
we throw out 200,000 as either too old, too young, too ugly or the wrong orientation. That leaves a dating pool of about 119,000 or roughly 60,000 of the opposite sex. So yeah you are probally gonna fuck a relative tonight.
I would like to point out that the idea of the application is not to avoid incest, but to see your own family tree and how you are related to other people by bumping your phones together.
There is a hidden (kind of an easter egg) feature which in addition to that sounds a warning sound if you bump phones with close kin.
Regarding incest in small populations is what you regard as a small population. A population in a small town in the middle ages where no one travels across the country to live, will have a high risk of incest. This is true for many areas in Europe in past centuries. However, in Iceland, throughout viking age and ever after, people have travelled for work. Workers travelled between places for jobs, in addition to the higher classes sending some of their children to other high class house holds in foster, for it would show respect and trust between families. Rendering this small population every mixed genetically throughout the entire island.
Surely incest is therefore not a real problem in Iceland, and the reason for the phone app is not to help fighting it, but as a "lulz feature".
True story ... at a recent funeral, it was discovered that my mother's cousin's granddaughter was married to my father's niece's grandson.
There's no blood relation whatsover, but nobody had realized the connection through my parents until they suddenly had someone in the room who came from a completely different family and couldn't figure out why they were there for that family. Took a few minutes to piece together.
I'd be more worried about the fact that cell phone apps can have access to your entire genealogy and ancestry(/incestry ;-) -- that sounds like a horrible privacy situation.
The entire native icelandic family tree (or, at least, most of it) is compact enough to fit on a promotional t-shirt for Icelandic company deCODE genetics, Inc.
Guy 1: "Is it illegal to shag your cousin in France?"
Guy 2: "Only if she's ugly."
Interestingly different attitudes to cousin love...some places it's encouraged, others, illegal incest.
10% of marriages worldwide, apparantly...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage
Without reading TFA, this actually seems like a cool app (if you're Icelandic, that is). It would be interesting to be able to press a button and see how closely related you are to your friends -- "Hey our great-great-great grandmothers were half-sisters!" Things like that. It would be mostly meaningless, but who doesn't want to know who's in the (very) extended family?
Had a similar situation happen to me in college... had first met this girl at a restaurant where she was a waitress. Later on we ended up in the same class, so one day we got together for study time (and to get to know each other better), and I found out her full name at that time. Turns out her last name was the same as my mom's maiden name.
Long story short: After a very short conversation about relatives we found out that my mom and her dad were 1st cousins. Doh! I have never been so disappointed as I was then... :P
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
New, from Mabeline.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
If you go back far enough, you'll find that you are related to Charlemagne, or Ghandi. The higher you go up your family tree, the more parents, and parents' parents appear, in an (almost) exponential spread. Well, unless you're part of the royal family, or in the deep south of the US, where family trees tend to be a lot... slimmer...
for the next app release
I think Iceland might want to do some scientific research because they might as well ban older women from having babies, since cousin marriage has about the same risk for genetic abnormalities. Normal marriage has a about 2% chance vs 4% for cousin marriage/older mother. After all animals are breed to even closer relatives quite often.
If they wanted to make a real difference gene testing is the only way to ensure that "bad" genes were breed out of course that would start to be a bit too eugenics for my taste. For social medicine state it would make sense to give free gene screening for any common genetic diseases partners might have for a given race. Also, a similar app could be made that just compared this data. Of course, someone would say lets ban marriage between partners that might give birth to inferior children to save money and of course think of as yet unborn children who wouldn't have to suffer.
Also, the ain't cousin marriage movement was started by eugenics movement and city people are biased against country folk it stuck.
This project is the byproducts of years of serious scientific research into genetic diseases by a company in Reykjavik called DeCode. The idea is that you can log into the thing with your social security number and trace your ancestry. There is no direct way you can trace the ancestry of other people or check whether you are related to somebody.The only purpose this serves, other than being interesting for geneticists and perhaps historians and genealogists, is to satisfy the Icelander's endless obsession with their ancestry. The further you can trace it back the more snob points you get. Especially if you can trace your ancestry back to the 9th or 10th century. Myself I have gotten as far as Harold Fairhair (lots and lots and lots of snob points), it also made it a bit strange to stand in the Viking Ship museum in Oslo and look at the skeleton of the woman they found in the Oseberg ship since she was in all likelihood the grandmother of Harald and thus my ancestor.
Whoever wrote that piece is either stupid or has a very poor sense of humor. O,h and in case you haven't overdosed on incest jokes:
Question: What happens when you marry your cousins for a thousand years?
Answer: Icelanders.
Question: What happens when you marry your half-sisters for a thousand years?
Answer: The Faeroese.
When I went to grad school to get my PhD in biostatistics, they taught us in genetic epidemiology class that 1st cousin marriages do not have a significantly higher risk of genetic problems in offspring than marriages by unrelated people.
Some parts of the world where 1st cousin marriages have taken place for many generations do have higher concentrations of some forms of thalassemia. But for a typical American who does not come from such a lineage, the medical risks of first cousin marriages are minimal.
My cousin is totally hot!
It is interesting to note that the taboo on cousins marrying is missing in nations that did not pursue the sickening evil of Eugenics in the first half of the 20th century.
Adolf Hitler actually thanked the Eugenic movement in the USA for providing the 'scientific' background for his 'race' policies in Nazi Germany. America was the heart of the eugenic movement then, and is its heart today. The owners of Slashdot, as backers of the same theory of 'racial purity', push articles like this as the usual crude propaganda.
Of course, it is a curious and interesting fact that when REAL issues of genotype damage arise, due to the US military forces increasingly using so-called 'depleted' uranium weapons against civilian targets, the owners of Slashdot do everything they can to suppress such information. In Iraq, where American forces fully supported by the owners of Slashdot carried out a holocaust in Fallujah, levels of genetic damage and cancer rates exploded amongst the local population. Studies of hair taken from women whose hair growth had been continuous across the period including the atrocities showed the presence of radioactive uranium as well, proving that the US had been using the same uranium bombs (not as conventional nuclear weapons, obviously) as the depraved racist state of Israel in its terror attacks against those Humans the zionists label as 'sub-Human'.
Eugenics, forced sterilization, female genital mutilation, electro-schock torture, and forced lobotomies have all been promoted by the highest scientific journals in the USA. The owners of Slashdot would like to see this tradition continue.
73 comments so far and no one's linked the obligatory xkcd?
I am not a crackpot.
Incidentally, in Alabama the same app is used to find dates.
At first I thought, "How could you not know?" But then I remembered that in Iceland, patronyms are common, and (so I've been told) there are not as many social stigmas surrounding unwed motherhood. So I suppose, when you meet someone, it really is possible that you could be related and not know it.
Proverbs 21:19
Was close to the cousin scene at one point....and probably would have. Complications.
Why don't you know who your cousins are?
We don't have a particularly close extended family, and my cousins are scattered around the US (and even some overseas). I still know who they all are.
I can see the occasional family feud causing issues, but is not knowing your cousins a really common thing in Iceland? Are we talking second and third cousins or something?
- Necron69
...all those people who are actually into incest - and then they find out they are adopted.
Aaaaawkwaaard!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
New Icelandic pickup line:
Nice gen, langar aà skrÃfa?
(Nice genes, wanna screw?)
The Digital Sorceress
...it was probably either that or giving in to the insistence of the vocal conservative minority and calling it "Whores!"
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I sure know who my cousins are, so that was my first thought. Then I remembered when I was watching to mutual friends get to know each other, with a flirty vibe. After talking for ten minutes or so, they realized they had the same grandfather. The dude sure looked socked and disappointed.
In most countries, marrying cousins is NOT considered 'incest' so can we please stop being childish over this.
Extrapolating would be extending the conclusion outside of the dataset. Interpolating is applying a conclusion within the data range, so you're (sort of) interpolating.
To turn the statement into something more like extrapolation:
An average Icelander has something like a dozen sexual partners in life, seventy percent are happy with one-night stands.
Therefore Nordic countries, including Sweden and Finland, are promiscuous.
Is this really common enough to require an app? Average household size is only 2.5 people, so large estranged families have to be pretty rare.
It seems far more likely to have an issue due to your mother not admitting (or not knowing) who your actual genetic father is, or in the case of an adoptee perhaps not knowing who either parent is. I have a good friend who found he had a half-brother and a whole exteded half-family he didn't know about after taking a genetic test ("Um, mom...we gotta talk..."). As a half adoptee, I suppose that would be useful to me too (but I'm not "on the market".)
Getting some kind of mutual genetic relation percentage would be useful both for solving the *real* issue this app is trying to solve, and to give the two people in question something of mutual interest to talk about, no matter what the result. A "are you my cousin or can be bump uglies" app just would be awkward.
So, in Iceland accidentally sleeping with your cousin in a very real danger. That explains some things... like Bjork.
... Near Fuck Communication?
You can "tap it" without worrying about being "related" to it... :)
this app has been banned in Mississippi and Alabama
When I read the title in my RSS feed I had assumed Iceland had began some sort of absurd wiretapping program to catch people engaging in incest.
Kinda sad how quickly that was my first assumption. I'm glad I was wrong and not yet another government going to weird lengths to catch people doing things.
The hottest, youngest, most desirable girls want Jerks, plain and simple. That arrogant, a-hole dominance and social command that makes every other woman and girl want them. If you don't have that, go home.
Older, uglier, wall-hitting women will compromise and accept for sex (and passionless semi-platonic relationships mixed with dutiful sex) those men who are "nice" but lack the dominance, success with women, social power, cruelty (a huge turn on for women, though they deny it) that even Older Women/girls want but can no longer command.
You see this in High School and College. Senior girls are not interested in dweeby freshmen boys and men, while their male counterparts definitely are, "SWUG" (Senior Washed Up Girl) have to settle if they have not already snagged a semi permanent boyfriend by late sophomore year. Yes in the intense competition for the few truly Alpha males, a girl can be "washed up" and hitting the wall at age 21, in her social context. Out of college, of course, she's got a bigger age group but less close-in-age dominant, Alpha, sexy males.
Translation: become as dominant, sexy, charismatic, and successful as you can with women if you are a man.
doesn't say a lot for the chances of casual sex in Iceland.
The likelihood that I'd pick up a cousin at the family reunion is orders of magnitude greater than turning to /. for mating advice.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In my experience, alcohol and a good wingman can help you make the transition.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
You confuse "being a doormat" with "being nice." All those guys who you think are assholes for not treating a girl the way you would? They're treating a girl like the girl is an EQUAL
Have you seen the way girls themselves treat their actual peers/equals (i.e., other girls)? I'd say "asshole" is not an inaccurate way to describe it.
I'd tap that.
Have gnu, will travel.
see also: code 46
"women aren't just vending machines you put niceness tokens into until sex comes out."
*SPOILER ALERT* - Don't click link unless you finished Baldur's Gate 2.
What a waste of tokens! You need 15 to get the Boots of Speed!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling