Thanks for the reply. I didn't know about that subculture. Well, the fashion subculture and the book are certainly related, but the article does say:
Within Japanese culture the name refers to cuteness and elegance rather than to sexual attractiveness.[131][132] Many lolitas in Japan are not aware that lolita is associated with Nabokov's book and they are disgusted by it when they discover such relation.[133]
Someone clarify this for me: is lolita/lola stuff about sexualizing minors or not? I see people casually using the term to describe something / some character, but from what I understand the term comes from a book about a paedophile...
Maybe my math is not the best, but wouldn't a simple function like f = cos(pi * z) work?
Say the sphere is centred at the origin. If I make this an integral in z, the area element is dA = 2*pi dz (the curvature of the sphere exactly compensates for the chord becoming smaller as we go from z=0 to z=1, so the area element is dA = 2*pi*cos(theta) / cos(theta), where cos(theta)=sqrt(1-z^2) and the first part is the radius of the circle defined by intersecting the sphere with a plane of constant z, and the second part is to take into account the slantedness of the area element relative to z)
Say the sphere center has coordinate z=alpha (the other coordinates don't matter). Now the integral becomes: integral from -1+alpha to 1+alpha of 2*pi*f(z). or, equivalently: integral from -1 to 1 of 2*pi*f(z - alpha).
And now it's clear that whatever the center of the sphere, this integral is zero for our function f = cos(pi*z) because of its periodicity.
This answer seems suspiciously simple, so I'm ready to be corrected here
Maybe it was this, by qntm: https://qntm.org/responsibility
qntm is a great source of these type of stories. He writes for scp too.