yes thanx grant
& i trust you are right
as it was just that a browse of search results turned up all these numbers
at random from various sources of unknown reliability
& i didnt & cant vouch for any of them
except for the 192 count that is
which alone i have checked for myself & do personally favor
not least because it seems to have the broadest credibility
also i didnt mean to connect the mental maps site with the country count
the marginals & pendings & whatabouts you raise are indeed interesting
& as you suggest present endless complications
but i find the count of independent sovereign countries most interesting
since this is prerequisite to any census of world class multisovereign points
which together with everyones land itself top off my own pantheon of fun
however i have been working on a sample count of the claves &or outlying
areas of the usa alone
both the inhabited & uninhabited ones indiscriminately
since it is all the topological niceties that most appeal to me
just to try out & savor some of these many complications
& will report back soon on this
m
>
>Michael:
>> 168 the lowest answer given by anyone tho unexplained
>> 170 number of currencies
>> 172 countries recognized by russia
>> 189 members of u n & thus upu
>> 190 number given by info please kids almanac
>> 191 recognized by uk
>>
>> 192 most popular refs as detailed above
>>
>> 194 recognized by switzerland
>> 200 plus recognized by germany
>> 239 iso diglyphs
>> 266 or so the highest including all dependencies etc
>
>I was surprised to see the UK (my native soil) credited with only 191
>in this list. I checked out the link on the "Countries by Heart" site
>you mention, and it does nothing to support this particular count.
>The linked site is a Foreign and Commonwealth Office list of Overseas
>Missions. As well as a few British Overseas Territories like the
>Turks and Caicos, it lists 187 countries. Missing are Afghanistan,
>Bhutan, Central African Republic, Iraq and North Korea. As far as I'm
>aware the U.K. recognises all of these, we just don't happen to have
>embassy staff on site, for various reasons.
>Similarly, the 200+ German-recognised countries don't seem to be
>borne out by the German site. The same old 192 countries are there,
>plus a host of dependencies like Midway Island that I don't think
>anyone would wish to promote as independent states!
>So the debate still comes down to the well-recognised marginals like
>Palestine, Tibet, North Cyprus and S.M.O.M., and the "pendings" like
>Nagorno-Karabakh, Western Sahara and East Timor.
>I wrote an article about the country-count once, and found the main
>problem to be the dependencies. There are isolated territories like
>the Azores and Canaries that are treated as integral parts of the
>parent countries. And there are places like the French Overseas
>Departments that could be considered part of the parent country, but
>which also run a limited self-government in parallel with the
>administrative structure of the parent country. At the other end of
>the scale, do we count Jan Mayen as a dependency separate from
>Svalbard? It is administered from Svalbard, but the practical day-to-
>day administration is done by the local military commander. What
>about territories with only rotating scientific and military staff,
>like South Georgia? What about isolated spots of coral and guano with
>no permanent habitation at all, like Howland Island or Clipperton
>Island? What about territories south of 60 deg S, covered by the
>Antarctic Treaty? What about territories that are half-covered by the
>Antarctic Treaty, like the French Southern and Antarctic Territories?
>At the time, after a hell of a lot of discussion, I came up with 42
>inhabited dependencies (with a permanent civilian population) and
>18 "uninhabited" dependencies (including those with only
>military/scientific staff). Since then I've bumped the inhabited
>total to 43, because the Finnish Aland islands seem to have as much
>autonomy as many other places I'd listed.
>(The original article appeared in the August/September 1999 edition
>of "Wanderlust" magazine, if you're interested.)
>
>Grant
>
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