I have some statistical questions regarding means and standard deviation
(sd) on which I would appreciate answers and comments. A common way of
thinking about simple measurements such as time (t) for any operation is to
consider the population to be all possible t measurements from which you take a
random sample using the mean and sd of the sample to infer the mean and sd
of the population. All this predicated on the population being a gaussian
distribution. Yet it is clear that the population is not gaussian (if for
no other reason than that there can be no negative times.) Does one just
ignore the very small tail of the gaussian here?