"base" employs some heuristics to determine if a module has already
       been loaded, if it has it doesn't try again. If "base" tries to
       "require" the module it will not die if it cannot find the module's
       file, but will die on any other error. After all this, should your base
       class be empty, containing no symbols, it will die. This is useful for
       inheriting from classes in the same file as yourself, like so: