With months and months of boring, ice cold weather, Iceland has a relatively liberal attitude toward sex.

However, with a population of just 319,000, the Icelandic gene pool is rather limited, hence a small team of developers came up with an app that can tell users whether their sauna mate is voluptuous Hilda or their sweet cousin Hildegard.

The app seems to be rather simple. The two “interested parties” can use it to display their lineage, just to make sure that they don’t have too many common ancestors. Any eventual offspring of such an unholy coupling might be cast to play the banjo in a remake of Deliverance, but it’s not just a public health issue, it also helps eliminate really awkward social events and weddings.

Sadly though, the approach simply wouldn’t work in most of the world. Iceland has a database of every person born on the island since the 18th century. It’s not a “who’s who” of Iceland, it is more of a “who did who” - and there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

Then again, most countries have a lot more people and genes to go around.

More here.