For Icelandic Lovers, an Incest Database

An Icelander's pre-date checklist: Put on a nice shirt, buy some flowers … run date's name through incest database? It sounds crazy, but with Iceland's population at just 300,000, the risk of accidentally romancing a relative is high. Íslendingabók, or the Book of Icelanders, is a website that claims to have tracked 1,200 years of genealogical data on Icelanders—a believable claim, since the New York Daily News notes it was developed by a software entrepreneur and a genetics research company.

Concerned Icelanders enter their name and the name of their date, and as long as both are citizens or legal residents who have an Icelandic ID number, the database will report whether the two are too closely related to get cozy. (More Iceland stories.)