After I wrote an arti­cle in this space for the Jan. 13 issue of the Torch say­ing that 2010 was the last year of the cur­rent decade, not the first year of the next, I received an influx of com­ments from friends and oth­ers telling me that I was wrong.

I was caught off-guard because I had done my research, which had told me that the Gregorian cal­en­dar was the inter­na­tion­ally accepted cal­en­dar, and that Astronomical Year Numbering (AYN) and the Julian cal­en­dar were outdated.

I am here now to tell you that I was wrong, not wrong about the fact that the Gregorian cal­en­dar is what we use, but in say­ing that AYN is out­dated; it is not.

Depending on which sys­tem one uses, the decade’s end can be either Dec. 31, 2009 or Dec. 31, 2010. I would also like to clar­ify that I am assum­ing that if we start with each sys­tems’ begin­ning and count for­ward by 10, that is how we mea­sure a decade. So with AYN, there is a year zero, and the decade would be 2000 to 2009, for exam­ple. With the Gregorian cal­en­dar, there is no year zero, so the decade would be 2001 to 2010.

I am glad I had this oppor­tu­nity to fur­ther learn about the usage of AYN and have peo­ple around me who tell me when I have been a bit hasty in mak­ing a claim. So I will end with a word of advice: be sure to research top­ics in their entirety because even though I thought I orig­i­nally had, I was wrong and needed to dig deeper to find the truth.