  Recently Abrahams and Cook devised a method of estimating the total radiated
energy resulting from collisions of distant black holes by applying Newtonian
evolution to the holes up to the point where a common apparent horizon forms
around the two black holes and subsequently applying Schwarzschild perturbation
techniques . Despite the crudeness of their method, their results for the case
of head-on collisions were surprisingly accurate. Here we take advantage of the
simple radiated energy formula devised in the close-slow approximation for
black hole collisions to test how strongly the Abrahams-Cook result depends on
the choice of moment when the method of evolution switches over from Newtonian
to general relativistic evolution. We find that their result is robust, not
depending strongly on this choice.
