HOW MANY DOMAINS ARE IN THE WORLD?

It's interesting that the general reaction of the media and friends about all those Trump-backed primary victories is alarm that this is the re-birth of The Donald to become the next president of the USA.  I look upon those victories with glee, for every tainted Republican is now vulnerable to any opposing Democrat on November 8.  Why?  Read my posting of 4August2022.

Otherwise, I messed up a bit.  Yesterday was supposed to be nostalgia day.  However, I instead inserted something more scientific, hurricanes.  So today I am returning to find an older posting and bringing it up to date.

I thought I would reach back to 26March2010:

     195 COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD

At that point, 145 countries had visited my blog site.  So how many countries are there in this world?

• The United Nations a decade ago had 192 members.  Plus, there are three more not in the UN:  Vatican City Kosovo and Taiwan.
• In 2011, South Sudan became a member of the UN.  So that would be 193 members and 196 countries. 

• 
  Kosovo  declared independence from Serbia in 2008.  However, sort of like China preventing Taiwan from joining, Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state.  Yet, economic ties were nevertheless normalized in 2020.  Kosovo is now supported by more than a hundred members, but Russia has become a problem.  China, of course, is serious about owning Taiwan, and have effectively scared off the world, so only 13 members have recognized this country.
• 
  The way it works in the UN is that if any one of the Security Council objects, no hope.  There are five permanent members (China, Russia, Russia, UK and USA) and 10 rotating, so 15 total.
• Vatican City is the smallest nation in the world, and has chosen not to seek membership.  However, it has had permanent observer status since 1964.
• In addition, Palestine has failed in gaining UN membership status, but has permanent observer status.  Israel is in opposition.
• There are also some future possibilities, for Western Sahara, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Northern Cyprus.  Greenland, Hong Kong and Puerto Rico could someday gain membership.
• See this list of around 80 that are smaller entities.

So when you add this all up, you get something in excess of 273.  This explains why the World Wide Web has 243 domain sites and 259 entities.  What is the difference?  Perhaps you can understand this:

The Manage Websites tab in Direct allows you to display the websites you are tagging by comScore Dictionary Entity or domain. The domain is the value as seen exactly in the address bar of the browser from which the tag request is fired. Entities as reported in the comScore Dictionary may reflect the exact name of the domain or be named slightly differently as reflected in Media Metrix reporting.

What is the difference between a domain and website?

This matter can get awfully complicated, so I'll stop here.

One point I can make is that this blog has collected 221 flags.  Look at the world map in the right column.   (note that if you see no right column, go to the top and click on those three horizontal lines) If you click on that map, you can see what domain has visited.  It shows that the USA has more than half the number of visitors, or maybe more amazingly, almost half of people who read my blog are not from the U.S

The number of visitors from this page is less than a million.  However, that is because a long time ago I stop paying them to keep track of all my pings.  If you look at the top (in this new version of my blog I don't show this--go to my older version), the number of visitors to this blog is just about hitting 2.5 million.  I compare this number with the miles I have flown on United Mileage Plus, which are up to 2,385,180.  Two and a half years ago when I took my last flight (it was actually on Japan Airlines in February of 2020 to Thailand and back, which didn't count, and I would guess these worthless miles must be in the hundreds of thousands), I was at that number, and wondered if I would be passing 2.5 million miles before reaching 2.5 million visitors to this blog site.  My blog will almost surely reach 2.5 million first.

• At the top of this page are other links
• Click on DETAILS, and see how these countries rank, with how many visitors and the timing of the latest person.
• The alphabetic list of all domains showing their flag can be seen here.

I end with two graphics.  First, Ukraine seems to be taking a few more offensive actions against Russia.  Here is a war front photo:

Finally, something you might not have known about jellyfish:

They also have no heart, bones or blood, and are 95% water.  Further, they aren't actually fish, but PLANKTON.  Finally, they can thrive in an ocean depleted of oxygen with lots of pollution, so might well be taking over Planet Earth.

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