Aye. The technique you started to expouse was for drawing an ellipse.
The simple hanging string describes a parabola or hyperbola (I forget
which). However on the scale we're talking about, the differences
between a hyperbola and a parabola are probably insignifcant.

On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 03:10  PM, Aristotle Sagan wrote:

>
> rereading your post... I think you have it.
>
> It is the simple hanging weight of the string to a point 8 inches
> below the
> base line.