by using a lookup table instead of a naive shift-and-count loop.  Based on
code originally posted by Sean Eron Anderson at
http://graphics.stanford.edu/%7eseander/bithacks.html.
Greg Stark did the research and benchmarking to show that this is what
we should use.  Jeremy Kerr first noticed that this is a hotspot that
could be optimized, though we ended up not using his suggestion of
platform-specific bit-searching code.