So, flying on a Southwest flight in early December I noticed that their peanut packages proclaimed themselves to be "byte-sized". I thought this was a ridiculous misspelling with no real benefit, but then I realized it might just be a pun. I decided to give them the benefit of doubt, and counted out the number of peanuts in each of the two packages I got. Sure enough, there were 8 peanuts worth in one bag, and 8 1/4 in the other bag. Now, this may be promising, but it was far from conclusive. This led me to want to find out:

On average, how many peanuts are in a Southwest "byte-sized" bag of peanuts?

The first step was to get a lot of bags of peanuts, or at least information on them. So I sent the following e-mail to my dorm chat list:

"So, I don't know how many of you fly southwest, but if you do, you may have noticed that their most recent peanut packages proclaim themselves to be "byte-sized". When I was flying home this last time it occurred to me that they might be justified in proclaiming that, IF there are either 4 or 8 peanuts in each bag, at least on average (4 is okay because of the whole 2 nut meat bits per shell thing). So here is my request: If you are flying southwest, get peanuts in that type of package, and don't want them, bring them to me. If you do want them, count how many peanut-quarters ( i.e. half of the roughly spherical thing...stupid peanuts and their stupid odd geometry), write that down, and let me know when you can. Why? I want to figure out how many peanuts are in the average "byte-sized" bag. "

Unfortunately I was only able to obtain 6 bags this way. They had, as a number of peanut-quarters per bag:
33
37
32
36
42
40

Converting to number of peanuts and running some statistics, this is an average of 9.2 peanuts per bag, with a standard deviation of 0.9. I'd do stuff with statistical effects because of the small sample size, but I forget my probstat. In general, though, we can say that the average is almost certainly not 8 peanuts per bag, and Southwest loses.