Check out this link for the real time. The board is about 3 to 4 minutes fast.
(or maybe it’s just compensating for the 3 minute load times…)
Your link goes to the Pacific Timezone page. The server is in Chicago, Illinois. Also remember that even though timezones are in one-hour increments, a greater precision could be achieved by using the correct solar time for your location (which varies continuously by logitude, not in discrete increments.) Maybe the Chicago Reader server’s three-minute difference is the correct solar time for its location?
Or it might just reflect the space-time differential betwen clicking on a thread and it loading in your browser…meowwwwwwww
Looks like Chicago is 87½° W. Which would make its solar time about 10 minutes fast of CDT. So the board time is 6 or 7 minutes slow of that. Perhaps it’s a comprimise, between solar time and real time?
London_Calling, that would be a neat trick, if the board were so slow that threads loaded three minutes before you clicked on them.
Of course, solar time doesn’t care about Daylight Savings. Chicago’s solar time is about 10 minutes fast of CST, making it 50 minutes slow of CDT.
We know it: I think the time on this site is off
Nah, the reason why people agreed on using timezones with a fixed offset to Greenwich time instead of the more accurate local solar time is that it became a pain in the … keeping track of train schedules and always having to adjust your clock when every town had a different time. Unless you are an astronomy geek, setting a computer to solar time doesn’t make sense, least of all for a server that communicates with the rest of the world. This server just doesn’t seem to be synced to an atomic clock and will accumulate a deviation until Jerry thinks it’s big enough to be worth spending time to adjust it.
I often wake up late in my European morning and then have to hurry requesting some threads to read before the board shuts down for the backup, and sometimes wondered why it closed early. But my computer clock drifts too, and at least for now it kinda equals out for me. 
Be glad it’s only a few minutes, the server could be accidently set 29 years to the future again. 
(Arnold, did my e-mail to you (re quick reply box) get through?)
And even if you are an astronomy geek, it would make more sense to set one’s computer to local sidereal time, not solar.
And y’know, I think my computer’s clock just might loose time at the right rate for that to work, too…