…are actually useful. Lukewarm touch? Molten lava. Ultra short range teleportation? That’d get you through a window without opening/breaking it, no problem at all. Complementary Chameleon? Air Search and Rescue will hire you on the spot.
Superuseless Superpowers is a pretty cool site. I look forward to seeing more of these.
Update: Professor Caleb from comments is disputing my argument on the teleportation thing, and he’s even got a diagram, so it must be Science!;
I personally think that the entire thing can be explained away mathematically if you assume that the thing being teleported is defined as being one-dimensional. Yes, yes, yes: “assume the cow is a sphere.” Clearly I need to read Fear of Physics.
.
I’m with you on the lukewarm, Moe. But I’m not so sure about getting through a window. I’m a touch more than an inch thick myself. If I’m standing at a window and teleport an inch forward, I’m about to have a brain full of glass, no?
It’s ambiguous. Obviously, the woman in the example isn’t immediately dead from air bubbles in the bloodstream from teleporting an inch in the open air, so there’s something there preserving life.
My wife and I just went round and round on this one, which was problematical, given that she’s an engineer and I’m not. 🙂
Well granting my brain is thus protected, the glass is about to be shattered then. I’d need to teleport … let’s just say a foot and leave discussions of thickness out of this … to get my mass fully from one side of the glass to the other. It isn’t the thickness of the glass that determines how far you must move, but the depth of the thing you are going to move.
Here’s a handy diagram I … found.
It’s like the FAILblog of superpowers. Personally, I agree on the lukewarm touch; otherwise, powers like in-flight flight and 99% opacity are little more than good starting points for conversation with the opposite sex, I suppose…
Guess you can’t use html, here’s the handy dandy graphical aid: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v640/absentee/GlassProblem.jpg
I have blatantly stolen that for the update.
Hmm, good point about using it for a pickup line, Jeff. “Here, stand right up against me and see if your friends can make out your outline through me … that’s right, really, really close.”