the trepanation reminded me also of a form of body adornment, which entailed creating screwholes in the skull. various shapes specially made for this form of head decor could then be screwed into the holes. i've been googling but have had no luck coming up with articles describing this.
this, in turn, led me to think of other such forms of extreme bodily modification - skull shaping, piercings, lobe stretching, tattoos, branding and scarring, amongst others... which, in turn, makes me think of different modes of dress in regards to function, fashion, tradition, culture: the multitudinous ways in which people have dressed over time and around the world, as well as ideas about how people will dress in the future and the new fabrics that are always being created (such as this pine cone-inspired fabric). it could certainly be a fun aspect to play around with for characters in the novel. the whys, hows, and whats of attire.
attire always plays a role in setting a scene/mood/time period - like YT's skate uniform in "snow crash" (or hiro protagonist's swords), or sean young's square-to-there shoulders in "blade runner", etc.
(the longhair forum is relevant to this aspect, i think.)
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GREAT observation. Amy and I loved the period historical collection at the Victoria/Albert Museum in London. I love the really odd fashion statements from various periods, like Elizabethan collars. Actually, Neal Stephenson gets a lot of mileage out of 17th century British fashion in Quicksilver. I'll have to dig out an excerpt. It's laugh-out loud funny.
I'm going to post some costume stuff in a minute.
I have heard about this auto-surgery phenomenon before. Josh Feldman told me about a man he'd heard about who had repeatedly lost consciousness while performing surgery on himself. He kept getting rescued by the paramedics--I guess he had some kind of trip-wire that would alert them. But they got tired of this funny business and had him arrested or thrown in a nut-house.
Have you heard about this stuff called BioSteel, a superstrong thread made from recombinant spider silk fibers? Here's the URL: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-01/nbi-nau011102.php.
this is funny: both fabrics we linked to are described within the articles as the "holy grail" of textiles.
Pine cone fabric: "'The Holy Grail of smart textiles is a textile that can open and close in response to the environment but it is very hard to achieve,' Humphries told ABC Science Online."
Spider silk fabric: "'Mimicking spider silk properties has been the holy grail of material science for a long time and now we’ve been able to make useful fibers,' said Jeffrey Turner, PhD, President and CEO of Nexia."
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