How Many Countries in the World?

You can't be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline -
it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.

- Frank Zappa (1940-93)
  US rock musician
 

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

- Benjamin Disraeli
 

● Map of World Population Distribution ●

This question isn't as easy to answer as you might think.  Supposedly, each country has a two-letter-designation (TLD) assigned to them for the internet - only some entities that aren't countries (including a few uninhabited islands) have a TLD as well.  The US Postal Service (USPS) has a list of countries on their website - only they include some places that are no longer countries or that aren't quite countries.  I tried the UN - they had a list of countries that are members - and stress there are non-member countries not listed.  I went to an encyclopedia site (about.com - WWW) that purported to have a list of all countries - of course, its list didn't match any of the others.  (The Visit column below denotes countries that have visited this website in the last 3 months.  This is what motivated me to create this page - I wondered how many countries had not visited and found determining what was a "country" difficult.)  Finally, I went to the CIA factsheet website for their list - only to find they included oceans and even world in their country list (along with lots of other debris), so I didn't list them because their list was too long, though you may want to give them a visit (all URLs are at the bottom of this page).

Here's my best shot.  I'll keep working on this.  Explanatory notes are also at the bottom of the page.