Standard methods available on all objects in Ruby

There are a lot of things I can do with any object in Ruby - there's a whole package deal of methods available to me by just defining and creating an object:

irb(main):003:0> class Thing

irb(main):004:1> end

=> nil

irb(main):005:0> widget = Thing.new

=> #<Thing:0x98c1e74>

irb(main):006:0> widget.methods

=> [:nil?, :===, :=~, :!~, :eql?, :hash, :<=>, :class, :singleton_class, :clone, :dup, :initialize_dup, 

:initialize_clone, :taint, :tainted?, :untaint, :untrust, :untrusted?, :trust, :freeze, :frozen?, :to_s, :inspect, 

:methods, :singleton_methods, :protected_methods, :private_methods, :public_methods, 

:instance_variables, :instance_variable_get, :instance_variable_set, :instance_variable_defined?, 

:instance_of?, :kind_of?, :is_a?, :tap, :send, :public_send, :respond_to?, :respond_to_missing?, :extend, 

:display, :method, :public_method, :define_singleton_method, :object_id, :to_enum, :enum_for, :==, 

:equal?, :!, :!=, :instance_eval, :instance_exec, :__send__, :__id__]

irb(main):007:0>

Question from last weeks course - But what do all of these DO?

Answer - I've added a list which describes most of them [here].
(written 2012-06-23, updated 2012-06-30)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

R108 - Ruby - More Classes and Objects
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