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I was reading over Jon Skeet's profile, specifically his answers.
Initially, the times each answer was posted show like this:
But after a short while, when Stack Overflow refreshes these times, it shows like this:
Note how the format of the time's display has also changed.
This has been fixed and will be deployed in the next build out.
I can't see your particular environment being the issue.
I can reproduce what you said and am on Debian 7.1 (wheezy) and Iceweasel 17.0.9.
It's likely that there are two different scripts, one when you load the page manually by clicking the "answers" link and then "newest", and another script which auto reloads the page.
Both cases I took the HTML and CSS and returned the same (barring the text h vs hours):
//manual
<span class="relativetime" title="2013-09-28 18:49:27Z">7h ago</span>
//auto
<span class="relativetime" title="2013-09-28 18:49:27Z">7 hours ago</span>
So possibly two different scripts, both use the same template but the two back end scripts pass a slightly different time to display to the template.
This is all speculation, but this can often happen in a large setup. ie functions get bolted on later, or a different developer, etc.
live-refreshis the appropriate term/tag for this feature...live-refreshis more for things that will change as a result of user activity (e.g. new questions, vote changes, etc.)608,067, like if the second one was 100 reps higher (taken a few seconds after the first)