The image is so sparse that it almost borders on abstraction.
The heat was so sparse that the rice had been cooking for hours and was still not ready.
One is that the evidence is so sparse that people are free to frame a favourite hypothesis about what it was that made humans different.
At one, Brooklyn Manor, the staffing was so sparse that a resident was put in charge of the entire place on one evening, a routine 2001 state inspection report shows.
So the Chad discovery opens a window on a fateful period in evolutionary history about which the fossil record has been so sparse that the remains could fit in a shoebox.
He's torn off the leash, running into the avant-garde with rippling tablas flowing almost arhythmically through the stronger beat line, and it's so sparse that until the chorus it could have been made on a four-track.
Yet the crowd was so sparse that Mr. McCall and Mr. Cuomo, each the leader of a mini-parade of people holding placards and snapping photographs, were practically the main attractions -- for the vendors, anyway.
Fortunately for the navigationally unskilled, tree cover in the Cedar Mountains is so sparse that sightlines extend for miles, and there's hardly any chance of becoming lost in a forest.
The dust not only coats the moon's surface, but floats up to sixty miles above it — as part of its exosphere, where particles are bound to the moon by gravity, but are so sparse that they rarely collide.
Nostalgically speaking, there may even have been a moment, before this Starbucks glut, when coffee joints were so sparse that you could have said, "Meet me at that--you know, that coffee place," and you wouldn't have had to give a brand name at all.
