Count elements in the real world in constant time by weighing them
Weighing elements works faster than counting them, because the scale is a fully parallel computing device. It sums the weighs of all elements in constant time. Of course you need an infinitely large scale if you want to talk about asymptotic runtimes. In practice your scale can only weigh a constant number of items at once, so your speedup is only a constant factor.

A related algorithm is Spaghetti sort.