title: How to extract the bits of larger numeric Numpy data types
body: <p>Numpy has a library function, <code>np.unpackbits</code>, which will unpack a <code>uint8</code> into a bit vector of length 8. Is there a correspondingly fast way to unpack larger numeric types? E.g. <code>uint16</code> or <code>uint32</code>. I am working on a question that involves frequent translation between numbers, for array indexing, and their bit vector representations, and the bottleneck is our pack and unpack functions.</p>