[jwatzman]

I'd not heard about van Emde Boas layout before, and it sounds super cool! I wish the author had included a simple example before focussing on the general case -- I find it hard to get an intuition for the general without a specific example! In particular, after some searching, I found the diagram at the top-left of page 4 of https://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/papers/soda02.pdf to be immensely helpful in getting my head around the concept.