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was the internationally accepted calendar, and that Astronomical Year Numbering (AYN) and the Julian calendar were outdated.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you that I was wrong, not wrong about the fact that the Gregorian calendar is what we use, but in saying that AYN is outdated; it is not.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.