Relatedness
Phyllis and I were discussing today how closely related you actually are to different people genetically speaking.
After doing some simple calculations and applying a bit of logic, we came up with the following (1/2 means that you share half your genes with that person, and so on):
| 1/2 | child |
| 1/2 | parent |
| 1/2 | sibling |
| 1/4 | grandparent |
| 1/4 | grandchild |
| 1/4 | half-sibling |
| 1/4 | uncle/aunt |
| 1/4 | nephew/niece |
| 1/4 | double cousin (child of mother’s sibling and father’s sibling) |
| 1/8 | greatgrandparent |
| 1/8 | greatgrandchild |
| 1/8 | cousin |
| 1/8 | greatuncle/greataunt |
| 1/16 | greatgreatgrandparent |
| 1/16 | cousin’s child |
| 1/16 | parent’s cousin |
Machine translation
Since there probably is found readers by this blog which doesn’t understand Danish, and therefore sometimes stay a little irritated about my contributions in Danish, tried I today to find an usable translation programme, which can handle Danish.
There weren’t many to choose in between, but finally I found a rather good one from VISL (I’d like to know whether Eckhard has brought a finger in the pie).
As always with that kind of programmes there is the result not always well, but if one knows Danish not at all, it’s decided better than nothing.
[This posting was written in Danish and translated by the website.]
Pensions
There’s a very interesting wee article in The Economist this week.
It lists how big pensions are in different countries compared to earnings before retirement. Denmark is slightly above average, but Britain is at the very bottom, with pensions averaging only around 30% of pre-retirement earning.
It’s appalling, to be honest. In effect it means people in this country can only have a comfortable retirement if they’ve paid off their mortgage and have some additional savings, but with rising house prices more and more people aren’t going to have that.